Introduction To Classical Mechanics Paperback – 1 Jan. 2009

I can't help but get the feeling that most bad reviews here are from people who are frustrated with the difficulty of the problems in this book.I was initially shocked by the amount of insights contained in every section! Throughout this book, the author presents various helpful examples with proper commentary. He points out the subtle points and he always shares his -at many instances, unique- insights. He is very verbose but everything he mentions is great and very beneficial for the reader!After Dr. Morin has provided the reader with the proper background to solve the exercises (without ever rushing it), he proceeds to solved exercises. There are lots of them in each chapter (about 20-30 each chapter). After this, the author provides the reader with a lot of unsolved exercises for him to solve alone.So, we now come back to the first sentence of this review. Many complain that the problems are diabolically difficult. Well, after so many worked out examples, I think that having difficult problems (with solutions of course) is a natural extension. The reader starts solving easy exercises, and they gradually get more difficult. Moreover, the problems are themselves very interesting and quite a few of them require creative thinking, which is amazing!Furthermore, for the reviewers who found that the exercises were too difficult, it is not expected by every reader to be able to solve the more difficult exercises. This is a book for everyone: from dumb people to really smart; it's just that the smarter you are, the more exercises you can solve, which is only natural. Mediocre students can skip the various insights and just go over the solved problems and refer to the solutions when they can't solve them. Anybody at a higher level than them can appreciate the insights, try to solve the solved problems and then proceed to the unsolved ones. Of course, as I said, you can't expect to solve everything because some exercises are for the really smart reader. But, it's safe to say that anyone who sticks with this book, no matter what his/her level is, is going to learn a lot about the concepts described here and learn how to solve much more difficult exercises than they thought they would be able to solve. Not being able to solve all of them is only natural for a book that does not assume that its reader is dumb.For me, insightful books like this should be in every physicist's bookshelf.

Unfortunately did not cover waves which I understand the aurhor is writing at present.

This is an excellent book, a must have. David Morin has the gift of crystal clear explaining things that are usually taken for granted in other books but are needed for a fundamental understanding of the matter. This book is full of very interesting problems from simple to very challenging, that help a lot in truly learning the concepts and creating a solid foundation for other physics courses.

This book is amazing, my only drawback is that some of the methods used are not as well explained as I had hoped. I am stuck going through this book because I have used other methods. This is good in a way as there are different methods for the same problem and this is now making me find out more about the methods used herein.

Excellent

arrived ahead of schedule. well pleased.

Great

I have bought this book in order to have a good reference for my study of classical mechanics. Now this book probably shares the top spot of my favourite textbooks with Feynman's lectures on Physics. There are a couple of thing I really like about this book;1.) The author is very thorough and goes in a lot of details (I especially like the remarks that highlight some of the important details)2.) The problems are well chosen, instructive and illustrate particular points in the topic + some of the problems are impossibly hard3.) The book is very rigorous and the author always tries to explain things in a wide variety of ways4.) Probably most importantly; The explanation is coherent and logically sound and the explanations are mathematically diligent as well as physically sound. This is probably the most distinguishing feature of this book form the others that normally to heavily rely on the mathematical explanation of physical concepts.To sum up; I would strongly recommend this book to everyone who really wants to understand physics and not just pass examinations.[University of Cambridge Physics (NatSci) Student]