Is it worth going through all of Landau-Lifshitz?

capandbells

Do you guys think it would be beneficial to take on the entire series of Landau and Lifshitz books, or do you think it would be better to cherry-pick books for each of the topics in the series? Which of the LL books do you think are the strongest (I mean: best selection of topics, clearest presentation, most relevant to modern theoretical physics)? The weakest? Are there any 'must reads' among them?

Daverz

If you plan on buying any of the books you should know that the new owner of this imprint has done a shamefully bad job with newer printings, with much of the small print typsetting smudged and unreadable. I would be very careful with purchasing site unseen.

I have

Mechanics
Classical Theory of Fields
Quantum Mechanics
Quantum Electrodynamics

I think Mechanics is essential. CToF is very good for the electrodynamics topics it covers, but I would not suggest it for an intro to GR, and there are better advanced GR books that cover more topics. The QED book is, I think, most useful to those who need a more detailed reference on QED specifically. I wouldn't suggest it as an intro to modern QFT. The QM book is a little old-fashioned in its notation, but I don't think that should really cause any problems for modern readers, and it's still a good general QM reference.

There was also the Shorter Course of Theoretical Physics, which was a condensation of the series.

Fractalismus

Statistical Physics 1 and 2 are awesome, so is Physical Kinetics. Yet to understand the last one, its the culmination of the last 5 books. So thats Stat 1, Fluids, Elasticity, Continuous Electro, and Stat 2. It is a beautiful treatment of plasmas using kinetic theory and a Feynman-like graph method that was developed in Stat 2. Mechanics seemed too brief for me, Classical Fields was nice using the invariant approach for E/M to derive relativity. The quantum book is good but the QED is possibly outdated but a great historical reference on deriving the Dirac equation with spinors and the theory of radiation. It seems Path integrals are the popular way in QED and QFD right now.