Customer Reviews

Quantum Mechanics Demystified

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

If this book didn't have LITERALLY at least one mistake on every page, I'd give it 5 stars. As it is, I have to spend half my time correcting the book. You should see how many things I've crossed out in mine. And the mistakes aren't just using p instead of rho (although there are plenty of those). Some fundamental equations that you need to know are given incorrectly. I'm only about 3 chapters through, but I can tell you that one of the answers to a problem in the Chapter 2 quiz is just plain wrong. (Number 7 - While dp/dt does equal 0, j(x,t) does not) You MUST have a strong grasp of physics and diffy q's to be able to get through this book. I'm giving it 3 stars as opposed to less because I find that I actually do end up with a good grasp of the material I just read, so it seems to be working.

This is a book unlike any other I could describe. The clarity and conciseness are to be highly commmended. The material is some of the clearest I've seen on this subject. It begins topics at a point that don't leave one feeling like there is a lot of hand waving going on and yet is not overly verbose either. Short of five stars because there are COUNTLESS silly errors in both the worked out problems and the included quizzes.

The glutted market for books on quantum mechanics populates a phase space where quality, utility, clarity vary greatly along with scope and breadth. This little book surprised me when I saw it. I purchased it and immediately worked through it and I was impressed. This author seems to establish a whole new paradigm, one based upon practical pedagogy. Instead of trying to impress the reader by showing he can solve complicated problems, the author impresses the readers that they can solve the problems. There is a consistency and uniformity to the presentation. Central concepts are reinforced through repetition. How I wish I had this volume when I went back to graduate school. After you complete the volume, you find that you have a tight grasp on the basic concepts of quantum mechanics. The author has impressed with his ability to convey the rudiments so clearly. I have tried to put my finger on his specific innovations. One that springs to mind is his presentation of the Bessel functions which have been hashed and rehashed. Here the author separates the functions into odd and even parity states. So by nudging us to a different vantage point, we gain a fresh perspective. This book will not replace the venerable Schaum's outline as a collection of practise problems; instead it is a book that students can use to teach themselves. I recommend this book at any time: before a first quantum physics course, during the course, between undergraduate and graduate physics, and as a refresher. Quantum Mechanics Demystified is a nice teaching aid that builds confidence. I hope that the other will attempt to work his magic on a follow-up volume on advanced quantum theory and yet one more volume on quantum field theory.

I'm taking a Continuing Studies (evening) QM class taught by Leonard Susskind at Stanford. David McMahon's QMDm book is the most detailed and helpful review the mathematical structure of QM I could find. His very many, fully-worked out math examples are unique in published form. You cannot begin to get your head around QM without doing the math drills and getting familiar with bras, kets, eigenvectors, eigenvalues, operators, states, Pauli matrices, and so on. Yep, there are many typos, but discovering and fixing them became just some extra homework! It has been about forty years since I last studied this material. Struggling with the excellent Dirac "Principles of Quantum Mechanics" was too big a jump for me without McMahon's help. Understanding QM without the matrix math is like listening to a baseball game without understanding numbers. Learn the "numbers."

Its very difficult to find a quantum mech. books that is enjoyable to read while learning. This is a good book for someone who is looking to understand the basic concepts, especially for people who had some trouble with the usual Shankar, Cohen-Tanoudji, Sakurai, Merzbacher, etc. . . This book is clear and shows many examples to explain the topic. Would have given 5 stars but there are many many "typos", (for example, pi instead of hbar). Would be great it they printed an updated edition in the future. Would be a waste not to perfect such a great book.

Highly recommend this book as a studying aid along with the usual QM course textbook

I got this book initially because it was cheap. I expected it to help me with a problem or two in my upper division QM course and nothing more. Instead I found a wealth of information geared towards letting me know what the hell is going on in as direct a way as possible. The simplest example, and one I feel incredibly stupid for not understanding quicker, is the explanation for all the digging around after eigenvalues and eigenvectors that we were doing. In one paragraph, clarity!

The end result of this book for the quarter was an A, and an easy A at that. I cannot wait for the second addition. Seriously, I can't, the next quarter starts in less than a week! Get that book out as soon as possible Mr McMahon!

I went through this book twice and found it very helpful in getting a basic familiarity with elementary quantum mechanics. Its strong point is the detailed exposition of the calculations which enables even people without a lot of math background to master and understand the material. The main problem is innumerable typos, which paradoxically are a kind of learning experience because they force you to go through each calculation in detail to correct the mistakes. But really, it's a shame that so little effort was made at proofreading before the book was published. The reader deserves better.

This would have been a good QM book if it weren't for all the typos. Quite honestly, I have never ever seen a legitimately published book with this many typos. The General Relativity book is much better in this regard, but it feels as if *this* book is being sold as an author's first draft, with no editing or reviewing having occurred. For this reason, I will proabably not buy the 2nd QM volume if there is one. While the presence of so many typos does test your understanding, it is very annoying, and getting more annoying with every passing page. And it seems to be impossible to find the promised errata for all the typos. And now that the quantity of typos seems to be increasing, it strikes me that it would take too long and be too much trouble to annotate them all, assuming that I could find the errata in the first place. The idea behind this book is a good one, and I would give it more stars if I didn't feel as if the author had rushed this book into publication before its time. Extremely annoying!

This book provides a quick and easy and thorough primer of all the QM notation that's scattered piecemeal throughout other sources. It is good as a supplementary text.

While you won't see the big picture from this book, more advanced books are not necessarily any better. An example is Liboff's Intro to QM, which has loads of technical details, but presents new ideas without any attempt whatsoever to motivate them. For motivation of the ideas of QM look to Bohm's Quantum Theory text.

Despite the typos in QMD, and perhaps because of them since they can force you to work the examples and problems in detail, I quite like this book.

Compared to French's introductory QM text, this text has ironic advantage of covering a lot less of the physics. That is a strange thing to express, but there is some value to having something that one can learn some of the mechanical bits from in isolation. One can then go back to the other texts better armed against the mass of QM notation, and try to get a handle on the actual physics.

This book covers a first semester course in QM very well. I can't wait to read what McMahon has to say about perturbation theory in part two of the series. I read Griffith's book and can honestly say that McMahon does more while covering less material. Thanks to McMahon I understand better the mathematical structure of QM. The end of chapter quizzes are good at driving home the main ideas presented in the chapters. The examples are very clear and concise. I recommend using this as a supplement to a more dense QM book.