Review 1000!

An extraordinary text for those of us with no desire to become professional physicists. Rather than focusing on technical derivations and the more complex mathematical methods and approximation schemes found in standard advanced undergraduate and graduate texts, Tipler expounds -- with understandable, solid writing -- on those problems of modern physics which will be encountered by engineer-scientists such as myself. Most of my physicist friends hold this book in disdain, and understandably so: the mathematics are indeed hand-wavy, and I don't feel this book would give you the background one needs to move into serious graduate physics (for instance, I know more solid-state physics, despite not having taken a class in that subject, than this book gets into). For those of us merely needing to calculate band gaps, resistance to thermal damage, and conductivity, though, the presentation is lucid and at just the right level of difficulty. Knowledge of the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalisms (the point at which I typically say 'fuck it', being generally bewildered by classical mechanics and regrettably undeft, these days at least, with symplectic manifolds) is unnecessary, though (as in Quantum Mechanics for Scientists and Engineers) you'll need fluency with linear and angular momenta concepts, as well as a head for ∂EQs. Good treatment of relativistic mechanics, where appropriate.

I read the Fourth Edition (on loan from a friend downstairs), comparing it with my Third Edition (purchased after reading the first few chapters), and feel you could get by with either one. The problem sets look somewhat improved in the Fourth Edition, though.

One star deducted due to much material having been moved from the book to the webpage.