Classical Mechanics by Goldstein, Herbert (1950) Hardcover

An outstandingly good quality book, both in content and in the book itself. Very satisfied.

This is an excellent way to learn classical mechanics. Actually, I prefer Landau's book. But Landau's book is about 170 pages and this one is about 650 pages. And you get much more material with this book. The book is readable, and there are plenty of useful exercises. You start off with Lagrange's equations. Then you learn a little about the calculus of variations. And then the central force problem, kinematics of rigid body motion, and oscillations. And there's material on Hamilton's equations, canonical transformations, and Hamilton-Jacobi theory. In this manner, the text covers in 420 pages what Landau does in 170. There are more explanations and more examples. It's not a bad way to learn the subject. In addition, there are chapters on special relativity, chaos, canonical perturbation theory, and continuous systems and fields. These are good topics to cover in a upper division class on mechanics. This book has a lot to offer a student and would be fun to teach from.

This is a superb book for graduate level mechanics. It is complete and rigorous. It is a bit pricy, so look for used copies. The second edition is more standard since there is a lot of new notation in the third. There are a handful of minor typos that a careful read will weed out.

This book is superb in its content, especially about the logical structure of the chapters organized. There are no other texts can match this.The problems are also challanging. If you're looking for an excellent mechanics book with the "conventional" mathematics (meaning: no use of differential geometry/topology/global analysis), then this is the one you should buy.

This is a far better book than any other book on Classical Mechanics that I have come across. This one starts with simple things and goes on to develop the ideas quite lucidly and logically - which lack in Landau. The explanations do help in understanding what the author is trying to establish.