Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Physics (Volume 2)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I've done extensive usage of this book lately together with Sears and Zemansky's "University Physics". So it has been natural to me to compare the books while using them day by day.
The result has been quite disappointing for me, regarding Halliday's book.
The book is very clear and well illustrated, and can be successfully used as an easy intro to the subject. It is also complete since you'll find all of the classical and modern Physics topics.
But ... but unfortunately in this case easy has meant shallow to me, since it often happened that for a given topic, concepts were given "as they were", with no explanation of the why or how scientists arrived to a given formulation or result. Take the case of Simple Harmonic Motion: x = Acos(wt+f). Although this formula presents no difficulties to me, I wonder where it does come from, how we (humans) first arrived to this conclusion. I had to read Sears and Zemansky to learn that the experiment that lead to this kind of formula includes a simple form of phasors.
The approaches sounds quite different to me: Halliday says "Take it for granted, be faithful", Sears and Zemansky say "This is the proper kind of formula, and you can see why by yourself if you do ...".
This is important to me, since I use to block myself on a concept until I fully understand it.
Another drawback of this book is the quantity of problems at the end of the chapter. In my humble opinion, an average of 65-70 problems are too few (considering you have the solutions of only half of them, i.e. the odd numbered ones).
So, this is my conclusion: easy and complete introduction to Physics, but too shallow to be really useful in a university course.

I am a graduate student in physics and I have been a teaching assistant for 3 years now at Iowa State Univesity and SUNY Stony Brook. I have taught introductory physics numerous times and I have teaching experience with this book: IT IS GREAT. It is everything that the students ever dreamed of. Every chapter has really easy to follow explanation of the fundamental theory and numerous step-by-step solved problems and examples. It also has nice boxes with general strategies for solving problems. At the end of every chapter there is an extensive collection of exercises that fit well with the material of the book.

An advice for the students: Dont start doing your homework before you understand the material. I have seen it numerous times, students that have not understood what is really going on, trying to solve the problems. Big mistake. Open the Halliday-Ressnick book, study the material first and then solve the problems. There is a general fear among the students to go through the theory of the book (any book) first and spend some quality time trying to absorb it. They just think that physics is too difficult of a subject and that they wont understand a thing. For that reason they just use their collection of formulae and blindly try to apply it in order to solve the problems.

I believe that Halliday-Resnick breaks this barrier, their treatment of the subject shows how much they care for the student and they do their best to explain things in the easiest possible way.Something that really breaks the ice is a photograph at the beginning of each chapter that shows an everyday phenomenon that will be treated in the course of that particular chapter, like the picture showin a young girl up in the mountain, with her hair floating up in the air! (a dangerous situation as explained in the book), or the explosion of the Hinderburg and also the picture of a man inside a car that is being hit by a lightning without harming the man inside!

As an undergraduate in physics I used this book too for my introductory physics courses so I also have read it from the student point of view. I believe that it does a superb job clarifyng the fundamental principles of physics without difficult or "intellectual-kind" of explanations. It goes step by step building up until you understand it. I also used this book extensively to prepare for the Physics subject GRE test and it helped a lot. I still keep it in my office and frequently look for things that I have forgotten. I totaly recommend it.

As for the mathematical prerequisites of the book that a previous reviewer has commented on I would say that you need to how to solve simple integrals (nothing more dramatic than a polyonym or a trigonometric function or 1/r and 1/r^2) and also it would be nice to know the meaning of a derivative as the rate of change of a function with respect to some variable. Nothing more. Enjoy!

P.S.1 I am familiar with the 4th and 5th edition. P.S.2 There exists a solution manual for the book. Very helpful.

Following this text can be quite difficult for one who has a weak command of mathematics or of basis physics principles. The examples are quite interesting, unlike many other textbooks. I must admit that most physics texts for scientists are more complicated than this. When the material is reexplained in a clear manner, the book makes perfect sense. I think that frustration with this book is due highly in part to those who took physics not realizing how challenging it can be, especially for those who do not understand such concepts easily. As for simply skipping lectures and trying to understand physics by reading the book, this is likely to be a complete failure; I don't know if any physics book could appropriately explain physics in an understandable manner without supplement. The problems, however, in the text are excellent, and while sometimes challenging, they are essential for a student to be able to solve problems on exams.

The first physics course I've ever taken used this very textbook. If you are about to be in the same boat as I was, let me tell you this: this is NOT a good introductory physics text. If you're not one of the kids who took AP Physics in high school, you will probably struggle with this book unless you have a very amazing professor.

Most of the formulas are given as "this is the general formula, and here's how we derive the other formulas from this". There's very little explanation involved with concepts, and when the author tries they are extremely hazy. This book apparently assumes that you've learned every concept before, and that you only need a brief overview and a table of formulas.

Not to completely bash this book - far from it. Formulas are listed in an organized and comprehensive fashion, and useful derivations are given also. If I need to look up a physics formula, this is the book I use as it's actually faster than sifting through Google. Beware, though, if this is your first endeavour into the world of physics.

This book reads like a beginner's CRC Handbook. Concepts are only briefly explained with some derivation of equations and definition of the variables. Examples are useless for students that need to see an actual calculation to do problems since most read like mathematical proofs. Yes, the problems are good.....but they'd be better if the text supported their difficuly, in which a good 90% dive into concepts that students have not encountered in the reading.

Lectures are short and most are taught by individuals that could care less about intro physics students, so the student must learn a bulk of the course outside of the classroom. This can't be done with this empty, pompus, overly technical book.

I used this as a text book for three semesters of University education. Some chapters are fine and quite readable, and others are random and completely lack organization. Some chapters take one point and beat it into the ground with a large baseball bat made out of lead, others mention something once and assume you understand it completely.

The examples are fair but compared to some of the chapter end questions you'd scarcely believe that they came from the same book, the difficulty varies greatly. As for the explanations even the best in this book I did not find as well stated or helpful to understanding as those found in Tipler's "Physics for Scientists and Engineers." Buy this book if you are taking a class and they require you to use it, buy it not if you are trying to learn physics on your own, as I doubt it will help you very much unless you already know it.

I used this book for my general physics course in USA. Since my native language is not English, I had to spend a lot of time to read through this book. But, compared to other textbooks, this book makes it easy to read even for a student like me who has language problem. The reason is that this book explains the concepts in clear manner and gives us further understanding by the immediate sample problems. I found this very refreshing. I can immediately check my understanding and never get bored in this way. I know other books that just explain the concepts for pages and pages...until I forget what I started with and fall asleep. Their end chapter problems are very good. many of them are interesting to solve.

This is an average text, which means there are things about this book that are both good and bad. Let me begin with the good. "Fundamentals" is a fairly rigorous text. There are many topics contained in this book and each topic is covered in adequate depth and there are a large number and variety of problems to solve for each topic. Also, like any good calc-based physics text should, it introduces vectors early and sticks with the use of vectors and vector components throughout the text.

There are, however, some bad aspects to this book. The biggest problem with this text (and most others) is it's terse treatment of inertial reference frames. A more indepth examination of reference frames would probably reduce student frustration later on when solving problems.

My other big gripe with this book is its outrageous cost. $140 is just too much for a text. My suggestion is this, if you're enrolled in a physics course that requires this text, just check out an intro physics book from your library if you can. If you're autodidactic, look into Dover Thrift books. You can get a physics text there with all the same material for about 1/7th the cost of "Fundamentals".

This textbook was very hard to understand. The authors discuss the material in such a way that unless you spend all your time reading their book, you won't ever get it. I spent way too much time over a full academic year trying to figure out what the book meant. And when I worked the problems, I often times didn't understand the material well enough to even begin to know how to approach them. The problems in this book are usually set up so that you have to derive your own equations *based on* the equations the authors discuss. The authors take a very loopy, confusing approach to thermodynamics (I had to try to forget a lot of the stuff I learned from this book when I took Physical Chemistry courses). Further, the chapters on thermo are not nearly complete enough, and the analogies used are usually bad. This book covers all the basic topics, like any other standard physics text, but the level of discussion is just slightly too advanced for the John Doe taking a General Calculus-based Physics class, whose only background is high school physics.
Look into some other textbooks...I hear Serway's book is
good.

The title of this book really agrees with the content it contains inside. Its all about fundamentals. The only good thing about this book which makes it better than some other textbooks written at the same level is that it has plenty of exercises and problems. It gives problem solving tactics at the end of almost every topic followed by 2 or 3 examples.
If you are looking to master problem solving techniques then it might be the best book you can get but if you are looking for some real physics, I am afraid you'll have to consult other books for that. Its like Schaum's outline series. A brief look at the theory, then some solved examples and in the end exercises.
The reason I've given it a good rating is that I only used it to master problem solving and am still using it.