ISBN:189138922XBook Description
John Taylor has brought to his new book, Classical Mechanics, all of the clarity and insight that made his Introduction to Error Analysis a best-selling text. Classical Mechanics is intended for students who have studied some mechanics in an introductory physics course, such as "freshman physics." With unusual clarity, the book covers most of the topics normally found in books at this level, including conservation laws, oscillations, Lagrangian mechanics, two-body problems, non-inertial frames, rigid bodies, normal modes, chaos theory, Hamiltonian mechanics, and continuum mechanics. A particular highlight is the chapter on chaos, which focuses on a few simple systems, to give a truly comprehensible introduction to the concepts that we hear so much about. At the end of each chapter is a large selection of interesting problems for the student, 744 in all, classified by topic and approximate difficulty, and ranging for simple exercises to challenging computer projects. Already in its Second Printing, Taylor's Classical Mechanics is a thorough and very readable introduction to a subject that is four hundred years old but as exciting today as ever./p>
Reviews From AMAZON.COM
The best of them all
The five "reviews" before mine are all from undergraduate physics majors at Amherst College. All five students were in the same class, which used a pre-publication edition of Taylor's book. I think their reviews reflect these facts, and say more about the students than they do about the book.
That being said, I also used pre-publication editions, but as a professor teaching the class. Before this book I had used the other "standards" (Marion and Thorton, etc). Taylor's book is by far the best of all of them. In fact I enjoyed it so much that I gave the author a lot of feedback about the material covered in the chapters and the problems. I wouldn't have spent all that time on the book if I didn't believe it was one of the best physics books I've ever read.
I use the book in the Jr-Sr mechanics course at Bates College. Since our students have already had a semester of classical mechanics from the book by Kleppner and Kolenkow, I begin with Chapter Six in Taylor's book (Calculus of Variations). The presentation is meticulous, the concepts are explained clearly and correctly (not always the case in other books), and the examples are carefully chosen. The problems are carefully chosen and carefully worded. Sometimes they present new material, e.g., the Thomas Precession, the rapidity, etc., using examples that clearly illustrate the essential points.
I also have taught the first six chapters and they are very refreshing and well-written. They are at just the right level for a student coming out of a calculus-based introductory physics course and, in addition, give a wonderful discussion of air resistance and viscious forces as they apply to automobiles, oil drops in the Millikan experiment, and many other practical situations. The examples are quite interesting and informative, and it was refreshing to read Taylor's original treatment of this important yet often short-changed subject.
Although this is a "first" edition, it comes after several pre-publication editions, all of which were class tested. Consequently, material that students found hard to understand was rewritten, hints were added to some of the problems, and essentially all the typographical errors were discovered and corrected. So the book has none of the drawbacks usually associated with first editions.
I especially enjoyed the optional chapter on Chaos. It is one of the best presentations of this potentially confusing subject I have ever read.
I have assigned chapters for independent study to undergraduate senior thesis majors. All of them have commented on how helpful the book was to them and how easy it was to understand on their own.
In a post-use review in the American Journal of Physics (April 2004, Vol. 72, Issue 4, p. 559), Professor Gayle Cook said "I find this a superb text. The clarity and readability of the book is so much better than anything else on the market that I confidently predict it will soon be the most widely used book on the subject." The rest of her review is very informative and well worth reading.
Finally, to get an idea of the the clarity and excellence of John Taylor's work, be sure to look at the reviews on amazon.com of his book "An Introduction to Error Analysis."
The Unhappy Medium
Taylor's book isn't bad. However, it does have some problems, the chief one being verbosity. As other reviewers have mentioned, Taylor often uses quite a few words to say not very much at all. It seems as though he tried to mimic the chatty style of Griffiths, but went a bit overboard. Though I generally don't mind verbosity, at times even I was annoyed by the slow pace of the book - especially after I checked Goldstein's book out of the library and was able to see how much more elegantly and efficiently he was able to cover the same material (and more!).
The upside to Taylor's wordiness is that he generally manages to explain everything in an easy-to-understand manner. It may even be easy enough to serve as a text for an introductory physics course, though that could be a stretch. Unfortunately, this book is probably at a level too high for an introductory course, but at the same time too low for a more advanced course.
The overall organisation of the book is not bad. Taylor divides it into "essential" material for a one-semester course and optional material that can be studied if time permits. The first five chapters review Newtonian mechanics (Newton's Laws, projectile motion, momentum, energy and harmonic oscillations). If the book is being used in an intermediate class, these chapters should be blasted through as quickly as possible (possibly just left to reader), in order to get to the more interesting material in the rest of the book. The essential material is rounded out by chapters on the calculus of variations, Lagrange's equation, the two-body central force problem, non-inertial reference frames, rigid-body rotation, coupled oscillations and normal modes, all designed to be read in sequence. The optional material consists of five chapters on nonlinear mechanics and chaos, Hamiltonian mechanics, collision theory, special relativity and continuum mechanics. These chapters are designed to be mutually independent - none depends on any of the others, so they can be read in any order.
There are plenty of problems, which Taylor labels with one, two or three stars, depending on their difficulty (though I personally found some of the two-star problems more challenging than most of the three-star ones). Taylor also includes some problems that need to be done using Mathematica or Maple, which is a plus. These problems are clearly marked and can give students some experience with this increasingly important software.
I had some trouble deciding between three and four stars, but eventually decided to go with three. However, I was already familiar with all of the mathematics Taylor introduces. Those who would be meeting eigenvalues and differential equations for the first time may find the book somewhat more interesting than I did.