Physics for Scientists & Engineers

The solutions/study guide was a great help. I would definitely recommend picking up this supplement if you need to buy the accompanying text.

I've been using this book for years. I really like it a lot. There are many god things about it. It shows how calculus is used to derive formulas (remember less formulas, really) and solve many problems... good examples that are worth noting (so important). The calculus is almost a lack of what you'll see in Calc classes because it's seeing what's going on in a problem and describe it with calculus... mainly using integrals (set up equations with infinitesimals and taking the integral to solve for what you need). It'd be nice to find a good book on this, but anyway, I took advantage of getting the information from instructors who could explain it more thoroughly. If you follow the calc stuff in the book carefully you should get it, but be aware that you can integrate with respect to one of the other variables (like limits of integration with arc length s vice angle theta). Overall, I feel it could explain the calculus even more... then it would be very complete! I think this book is very well written, clearly presented, and has pretty much all the classic examples and problems. I think it needs to clear up some modern physics stuff, though. I felt a little lost and needed to search other books on that stuff. BTW, it appears there is a new 2007 edition coming out with "Modern Physics" in the title... so that might be the one to get. Anyhow, I love how this one has been around a while and it's a great reference for Univ Phys material. There are answer key/solution documents going around everywhere, but it would have been nice to see one in pdf format (the word one substitutes fonts and isn't in "pretty print" math format... a good version should be somewhere on the web... else I'm going to make one). Overall, I give this book a 4.75. The student solutions manual might be worth checking out (I didn't go that way). Thanks and best of luck.

I could write probably pages about this book but I want to keep it short. If you want to learn physics (at college and university level), then go no further. This is THE BOOK. I had used it in class before and I still keep it as a reference. It is easy to read and very well organized. I highly recommend this book.

I used an earlier version of this book when at UC Berkeley a few years ago. It was required for two of my classes and for the third, another book was required, but I always referred back to this one. In fact, I continued to refer to this book after graduating and working as a geophysicist at the USGS. The older version was very easy to follow with a list of useful equations right in the beginning. It did require a fairly good understanding of very basic physics which should come from a high school course. Perhaps the exercises are difficult, but that is only relevant when considering whether your instructor or TA is good or not. I am now in graduate school and wishing I had not decided to sell this book a couple of years ago and will certainly purchase it again.

I used this book in my four-quarter introductory physics sequence in college. This book does exactly what it's meant to do: give the reader an introduction to the concepts of physics. The book is more qualitative than quantitative, and uses only basic calculus that the student should be learning at the same time they are taking an introductory phsyics course. The book is very colloqual, and is a good read.Some reviews complain that the book isn't rigorous enough, and glosses over material. They forget that this book is only meant to be an introduction to the ideas and basics of physics. Mathematical rigor should wait for upper division courses.Other reviews claim the book assumes too much of the student. I disagree. The book rarely goes beyond basic calculus. Some ideas may be unintuitive, but you just need to wrap your mind around them. Some of the problems are definitely tricky, but they help develop problem solving skills.Overall the book is a great reference on the concepts of phsyics. I still refer to it when I forget why a certain thing works a certain way.