Schaum's Outline of Quantum Mechanics

The detailed calculations and discussions of methodology in this book far exceed those presented in the typical quantum mechanics book. This book, along with the book Quantum Mechanics Demystified (these two books are a superb complement to one another and should used together), should be required accompanyments to any quantum mechanics book. While almost all quantum mechanics books give an adequate discussion of the basic Schroedinger Equation and its applications, they are usually flops insofar as matrix mechanics are concerned, especially in the case of angular momentum. These books more than makes up for that. I personally am using this book and Quantum Mechanics Demystified to review a subject that I studied more than 40 years ago and find it to be very clearly written, making it more than adequate to overcome some very substantial holes that were not covered by my previous books. The authors should be well pleased with their work.

This is how I learn quantum. I use this book weekly, while my Shankar sits on the floor. If you are taking quantum at either the graduate or undergraduate level, do yourself a favor and buy this book. At least your homework will go easier.

If you are new to Quantum Mechanics and are clueless how to solve problems, this book is your guy. The book is flooded with worked out problems and has plenty exercises that will keep you busy for hours.This book is a great aid. Goodluck.

The rapidly rising Israeli science represented by Peleg et al. produced here an unusually concise, clear, and well organized presentation of a complicated subject with the benefits of worked out problems. They managed to do this with little sacrifice of detail, providing a mathematical background chapter and even a chapter on the foundations of quantum mechanics with six postulates and a discussion of the Schrodinger versus Heisenberg pictures. Dirac's bra and ket notation is explained and used frequently, and the difficult subject of spin receives its own chapter. The book keeps up with latest trends in mathematical and physics research by having three chapters on solution/approximation methods (one of the main recent trends in mathematics and physics is obtaining solutions and approximations for equations including those of Schrodinger, Einstein, Navier-Stokes). The complicated topic of scattering theory receives its own chapter, as do angular momentum and radiation by semiclassical treatment. For more detailed works, see my reviews of Cao, Carlip, Kursunoglu, etc., and also the book Quasi-classical Methods.

This Schaum's outline is a dream come true for physics majors. Sure, the presentation of the theory is ridiculously brief as it is in all of the outlines, but the wealth of solved problems is why people by them. A dedicated student could work through the entire outline in one summer. As you might expect it does not cover every topic and application, but all of the basics are here. It is actually a bit lacking in supplementary problems, but you will probably be busy working those in your assigned text anyways. The chapter on numerical solutions is unfortunately written in FORTRAN instead of C or C++. I hope the folks at Scaum's, which is a division of McGraw-Hill, come out with outlines in statistical physics and electromagnetism for physics(they have a watered-down outline for EE majors).