Quantum Physics

We used the first edition for both semesters of my undergrad course (it's always possible screw up a book in later editions, I suppose). We went through most of the book with our instructor page by page. This is not a chatty book. It is a very tightly written with no fat. You'll need to work through the book with pencil and paper as if you were doing a problem set. So I wouldn't suggest it for a first read, but it's a great book to have for review as there is no extraneous crap.

I used this as one of my primary texts at university (I did Physics at Oxford) and thought that it was one of the best (along with Schiff). Much clearer than many other standard texts which can get a tad involved, and emphasised some of the fundamental maths involved.

I disagree with others that this is a poor text. I have noticed that this book tends to be used at the powerhouse universities in physics. It has been a text at Princeton, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, Illinois, Chicago, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington, Colorado,UCSD, and UCSB. This is a pretty respectable rouster of the top physics schools.I think this list contains 7 of the top 10 with the other 3 schools using either a harder book yet (Stanford = Cohen Tannoudji) or a book written at their school. (Cornell = Liboff, Liboff is at Cornell). Caltech uses Liboff too, but in a Freshman course. The junior course at Caltech, phys98, uses Merzbacher and Cohen-Tannoudji. I think the reason that it is used is that it is succinct and covers alot of ground. It is an undergraduate equivalent to the famous book by Schiff, a book that the best students will like because of its efficiency and elegance, but one that will be frustrating for students who are not well prepared, it is demanding, it requires you to be able to fill in some steps. I find the problem sets are quite good, and drag you through a lot of situations. I find that filling in the gaps in his calculations isnt overly difficult and is helpful. I really like all the applications in the second part of the book. It is true that Gasiorowicz expects you to be able to transfer information from examples that are not the same as the problems in the problem sets, there are no plug and chug problems of the type found in undergrad engineering books, Gasiorowicz assumes this is not needed. Think of this as training to wean you from such crutches, believe me, if you think Gasiorowicz is demanding, JD Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics, the near universal text for grad physics E & M, will crush you.

I used this book as a first time tool for learning QM and i found it very useful.This is a very clear step by step introduction to QM beggining from the basics and progressing to the level where you are able to be exposed (by another text of course)to the full Dirac formalism.I rate the text 5 stars!

I agree with the first reviewer about this book being better suited to a reader who already has some experience with the subject. Someone coming to the subject for the first time might be better off with a different text (perhaps the third volume of The Feynman Lectures on Physics).Nevertheless, I have to give Gasiorowicz's book five stars on account of its many strengths. The presentation is clear and concise, allowing the reader to keep the main concepts in better focus. Despite its relatively short length, this is a comprehensive (though obviously not exhaustive) volume, and some interesting higher-level topics are introduced along with the more fundamental material. It's true that a few more solved problems and examples could have been included, but I feel that the clarity of the presentation and the derivations more than make up for this.