Customer Reviews

Physics for Engineers and Scientists (Third Edition) (Vol. 1)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of the better textbooks for introductory Physics for science majors. Halliday, Resnick and Walker's emphasizes on problem solvings; Serway's makes great balance between concepts and applications; Giancoli's is more conceptual oriented; Young and Freedman's has a lot of excellent problems and explains concepts very well; Tipler's is quite boring and concise. It's always nice to read a newly published classical physics textbook to see how the same subject is presented differently by the different authors. But since this book emphasizes the practical aspects of physics, it's probably more welcome than the others for a college level cal based introductory physics course. There is a complete Answer book to the problems that I found quite helpful. Problems are pretty much the same for all the editions. ISBN-10: 039395756X, ISBN-13: 9780393957563

I used this book for an E&M class, and I liked it. The explanations are very good and easy to follow, and I found that you can pretty much read the textbook while working the examples and get a pretty good understanding of what's going on. The problems range from easy to the difficult side of medium. If you want some really challenging physics problems, go check out Problems in General Physics by Irodov.

Overall, this is an excellent calculus based Physics text. Diagrams and text easy to follow. Would recommend this text except...
Treatment of entropy is very superficial and still described as "increase in disorder". Surely, there are better explanations for budding scientists in the near centennial of Quantum Mechanics. Introductory chemistry texts do a much better job relating entropy to energy dispersal as a function of volume and/or quantum energy levels. I expect a physics textbook provide better conceptual and quantitative feel of entropy and not be outdone by an offspring science textbook like chemistry.
The extended edition also includes Quantum Mechanics. Again in many ways introductory Chemistry books do a better job at this level.

This book seems to be decent. There are quite a few mistakes in the back of the book when it comes to answering the odd numbered questions. Other than that it's easy to understand.

Good/Okay Condition- recieved it earlier than expected. Had no problems with the sender. Pages in book are good-(no rips or tears).

Wonderful text for beginning physics covered in a way that makes physics enjoyable for anyone. Topics include Newtonian physics, electricity and magnetism, waves, optics, relativity, quanta, particles, thermodynamics, etc. There are great illustrations, charts, graphs, tables, chapter checkups, discussion questions, problem sets, and appendices that cover everything you need to know to fully understand beginning physics.

Text is utilized by the great Prof. Walter Lewin in his course 8.01 at M.I.T. Course is available from MIT for free on their website.

It's a good book with a lot of examples, but not intuitive and some answers are not explained in detail. Some math work is left for the student to figure out so if you are not that good or don't remember your algebra and calculus, you may need to catch up along the way. Great companion for MIT courseware for Physics.

For me: Excellent book with straight forward detailed explanations and good examples. Great large colorful format. It covers Physics I, II, and an introduction to Special Relativity and other issues. I am using it with the MIT OCW courses and it is a real pleasure to use!

I had to use this book for my Engineering Physics 1 class. I found that it will cover all the material that's presented in class, but not deeply enough to solve difficult problems. It will essentially tell you all the formulas that you need, but leave you to put together how it fits with your problems. Also some derivations of equations sometimes lack explanation and aren't very intuitive (for example it took me a while to understand how the equation for center of mass for a uniform solid was found). However the checkups at the end of each section are a good way to see if you conceptually understand the material. But overall you may need to refer to other resources to find all the information you need.

The language in this book is clear, and there are lots of pretty pictures to help you out. I thought that the explanation was rather weak at times, and there were simply not enough words in many sections to understand the material.

I guess the thinking was that the example problems would clarify much of the material, and they did help to some extent. However, I found myself leaning heavily on the format of the example problems to solve the homework problems, and if one of the homework problems didn't follow the format of an example it was difficult to figure out just from the reading. There are a _lot_ of problems though, so that makes it easier to prep for tests, the downside being that the answers in the back of the book aren't very helpful in comprehension.

The book is definitely no substitute for going to class, and if you have a poor teacher than you might want to invest in the solutions manual (I haven't ever read it, so no guarantees).