No-Nonsense Classical Mechanics: A Student-Friendly Introduction

I am writing this review after reading this book and the Quantum Mechanics book from cover to cover. I wanted to write a review after reading all the No-Nonsense series books from cover to cover. But I noticed that my opinion of this series will not change by further reading.They say about a novel that it should move your heart, stimulate your mind, and touch your soul. Otherwise it is not a novel.Very unfortunately, we have long forgotten that this lesson should also apply to physics (and other science) books.The No-Nonsense Series gives a rap on the knuckles of graduate text book writers to wake up to this age-old dictum.Every page of the two books in this series I read from cover to cover stimulated my heart, mind, and soul.Why?Because on every page I saw not only equations but, more importantly, connections between various perspectives, aspects, and even fields of physics. I cannot say anything more because the rest is details which more learned people than me have already expressed.Since a few years I am noticing a trend in physics books where a new breed of Young Turks are appearing on the horizon of science, like Huns on the horizons of Rome, and telling the academic establishment that if you cannot deliver good stuff then we will.Most of these Young Turks are unknown, and have no influence or positions in the academic world, like the writer of the book reviewed.To me this is a great paradigm shift which will in the long run bring Nobel Prizes in Physics to outsiders who have nothing to do with the academic world."Outside writers" today, "Outside Nobel Prize Winners tomorrow" - this seems to be the paradigm shift, at least to me.

The No-Nonsense series should be part of the syllabus, or even the main textbooks for every introductory physics curriculum. I really appreciate the work of the author, since nowadays, in this era of super specialization, the basics are being forgotten little by little. The traditional introductory physics books tend to be so wordy, so full of useless examples. The No-Nonsense series shows the whole picture, something that should be done in every subject. From there, it is easy to know where one is going, and how every new concept fits, and is deduced from previous ones. Learning Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics from the very beginning, is absolutely fantastic. One of the things I like the most, is the presentation of Classical Mechanics from different arenas. I did not know, for instance, about the Koopman-Von Neumann formulation. Everything is to be gained from studying one subject from different points of view. Brilliant books. Thanks to the author.

I agree with the favorable remarks made by the six previous reviewers: This is a useful book for anyone who is learning for the first time or who is going back to re-acquaint themselves with what they used to know.In contrast to most of the standard texts in this formal subject, the author has managed to convey his personality and philosophy of teaching with a sense of humor. This is reinforced by his generous use of figures/diagrams and by the wide margins that let his annotations (and the reader's own scribbled notes) be located just where they belong.I admire the design and production of the book: It lies open easily at the selected page. The typography and the page layout generate a text with enough white space to let the reader relax and mull over the ideas being presented.(I'm writing here about the paperback version of the book; I'm guessing that the Kindle version would not be as friendly)As others have pointed out, Schwichtenberg's book lacks the problem sets needed to be the only text for a university course. However, the price is so modest and the content is so enlightening that should be strongly recommended.

Jakob Schwichtenberg's No-Nonsense Classical Mechanics is transforming my efforts to learn physics at a college level. I am a retired high school math teacher and I've been trying to use Maple computer algebra software and various books to teach myself classical physics, and hopefully, quantum mechanics and relativity eventually. I have some good books--Wolfson and Pasachoff's Physics, Frank Wang's Physics with Maple, Susskind's The Theoretical Minimum, and Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences by Mary Boas. But it just wasn't coming together for me until I started reading Schwichtenberg's book. Wolfson's Newtonian textbook is a very accessible reference work, but way too detailed for my needs. Susskind's book is the kind of thing I've been looking for, but he presupposes too much prior knowledge and doesn't build up the presentation in the truly student-friendly way that Schwichtenberg does. Wang's book gives you the tools to learn physics using Maple, but also presupposes way more than any undergraduate level student knows. Boas' book is also an accessible reference work, but do you really need to know ordinary differential equations before you learn the calculus of variations? For me, it's challenging enough just to learn multivariate calculus. With Schwichtenberg's book, I'm off and running now and can use Maple and these other books selectively to go into greater depth on select topics and solve exercises without losing the forest for the trees. Thank you, Jakob Schwichtenberg!