Customer Reviews

Planetary Science: The Science of Planets Around Stars

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I admit it. I like comprehensive textbooks that cover a subject convincingly. If I had to teach a class in Planetary Science, I'd probably pick the book by de Pater and Lissauer. That's a really good comprehensive text. But this one is good too. And I certainly would enjoy teaching planetary science from either book.

What this book does is cover descriptive planetary science in twelve chapters, covering about 190 pages. These chapters require very little prior knowledge of mathematics, physics, or astronomy.

After that come 42 chapters on very specific topics. These take another 280 pages or so, and they require a little more knowledge of mathematics, physics and astronomy. They also teach some fundamentals of physics and astronomy that prospective planetary scientists need to know. Look at the table of contents to see the topics in this section.

The benefits of this approach are twofold. First, the book can be used to teach a course at a rather elementary level, using mostly the first part of the text. Second, the book avoids the trap of glossing over a large number of topics without explaining any of them really well: the 42 well-chosen topics are presented wonderfully.

The negative side of all this is that some topics are omitted. I'd never think of writing a book like this one. But I'm sure glad Cole and Woolfson did!