The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics by Leonard Susskind
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
...This work presents classical mechanics including conservation laws, Hamiltonian mechanics, and planetary orbits. Such focus is appropriate for a book under two hundred fifty pages. There are little to no mentions of relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory. This allows room for the clear description of advanced classical physics concepts. Somewhat surprising, the authors also use that room for the breezy and humorous. I challenge anyone to show me a book that can skip from a groaner joke about George and Lennie from Of Mice and Men discussing physics to Poisson brackets in a single page. This is an excellent work for its intended audience and the authors succeed in making the material concise and easy to read. I am very glad to see that future volumes are promised. I do have to say that in the age of LaTeX typesetting is at times surprising how careless some of the mathematical typography is. Dots notating differentiation are absolutely untethered from their function and exponents drift about in a disconcerting manner.
[See my entire review at MAA Reviews]
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