Schaum's Outline of Physics for Engineering and Science

This book is great. It helps you understand difficult topics in such an easy and quick way. It gives you lots of practice problems and solutions to each one. They help you solve problems the easy way.

A very nice book in it's first edition. It has calculus and all deductions we don't have in "College physics" and also added some "personal" caracter to some exercises. But as it is in the first edition there are some minor mistakes like k=1/{4}\Pi\epsilon_0 and not k= 1/{4\Pi \epsilon_0} or O instead of C for electron charge in page 453. But what scarred me more was saing that V=IR was Ohm's law in page 284. Nice to see Maxwell's equations also in diferencial form and Schorodinger equation!

I'm just a regular guy, rather than a physics genius. This book was just another in my huge stack of preparatory books that I'm using to get ready for my ph.d. qualifier. Yes, this book is a bit too elementary for use on most qualifiers, but Browne has done what nobody else has done, he has taken all of the most important areas of mechanics, e & m, optics, thermo, quantum and relativity and present the material in an easy-to-understand way. The amazing thing though, is that he has managed to make a simple book but still explain the important areas of advanced physics. You won't find a derivation of -- for instance -- the Maxwell Eelectromagnetic wave equation and Poynting Vector, but the equations are in there, and he shows you how to use them. I can go through my more advanced books and even my simpler guidebooks, and one thing strikes me immediately ... that Browne is in the same class as Griffiths, Speigel and Landau. He has written a book about physics, and he understands physics. The clarity of thought in this book can only come from a seasoned professional with years of experience "behind the pencil." This is not the type of book that is written by a brash young physicist that needs to show how smart he is, but by a grandpa that really does want to make things easier. Amazingly, he even gives a skeletal outline as to how Schrödinger may have come up with his equation, which is nice ... most other books just say it cannot be derived and leave it at that. Ironically, I had seen this book back in my undergraduate days, and thought little of it. But now that I have enough knowledge to want the simplicity of physics, rather than just a head full of equations, I see the true value of Browne, he UNDERSTANDS, and helps me understand. Yes, there are a few minor mistakes in the book, but not as many as other reviewers have said. Most of the time, his "error" is either a very obvious typo or a wrinkle to a problem that looks like an error, but is actually correct. His problems are all interesting, and almost exclusively applied problems. (It wouldn't hurt to have had a few more mathematical type problems, but that's okay.) He even gives amusing personal stories in the problems to keep things interesting. So now the book is valuable to me because I already have a head full of equations, and I'm already fogged in and can no longer see the forest, just trees. But Browne gives me the aerial view, and I can see how everything fits together again. I use this book, I live with this book and I'll probably use it for years. I recommend this book. At about $12 you can't go wrong, it's worth many times more.

Do not be fooled by those who declare that there are errors in this book. I have worked through many Schaum's books and am yet to find an error; however, because of the extreme complexity of some physics problems, it may seem that there are errors in the text. Every time this happens, I get really technical and eventually find the solution to match the solution given in the book exactly. The Schaum's series is very easy to read and understand, but a certain amount of patience is required.

I taught calculus-based physics to undergraduates, and I recommended this book to my students as a study aid. The solved problems are an excellent tool for learning. Very useful book.