Customer Reviews

Introduction to General Relativity

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Although Ryder's book is riddled with typos (mostly in index manipulations) and lacks detail on many advanced topics, it does contain some of the clearest explanations and detailed derivations of any GR book out there. The author provides ample illustrations and motivation for more abstract concepts, such as curvature, before diving into the math in order to make the results easier to comprehend. Furthermore, he gives several examples, like calculating the components of the curvature tensor via differential forms, that I have never seen in other GR books but are definitely instructive. Most importantly, Ryder gives some of the clearest (though occasionally pedestrian) explanations of technical concepts that take the student beyond mindless manipulations of mathematical symbols. There were numerous instances when reading this book that I remarked "that's what all the other authors were trying to explain but couldn't." For this, Ryder's book is a good place to start learning GR at the advanced undergraduate level before moving on to more formal and rigorous texts. It's probably not suitable as a formal textbook for a course, but it is invaluable for actually understanding the material, a statement that does not apply to the vast majority of unnecessary GR books out there. Ryder and Hartle are the perfect starting point before moving on to Wald, whose masterpiece remains unequaled.

This book contains conceptual and calculational errors. It contains nothing new, and the level is also not very high. It is also not pedagogical, for example the chapter about newer mathematics in Relativity is confusing. There are many better books on General Relativity, like for example the books of James Hartle, Landau+Lifshitz, Adler+Bazin+Shiffer and of course the very complete book of Misner+Thorne+Wheeler. In this sense, the book of Ryder is irrelevant. To learn Relativity on a solid and a higher level basis , one should not use this book.

The fonts are quite small and hard to read in my case. But this book is good for beginning
graduate students. It can serve as an easy and simple introduction to general relativity.