Foundations of Mechanics, Abraham and Marsden

[ForMyThunder]

Is Abraham and Marsden's Foundations of Mechanics a good book to learn Classical Mechanics? In other words, if I were to go through this book (which I believe is more mathematical than physics-related) would I have a good, intuitive grasp of Classical Mechanics?

 

[jtbell]

How much background in physics and mathematics do you have already?

According to the preview feature on amazon.com, the "Preliminaries" section includes topology, finite-dimensional Banach spaces, local differential calculus, manifolds and mappings, vector bundles, ...

That looks like a major stretch (to put it mildly) for the vast majority of high-school students in the USA, and even for the vast majority of undergraduate university students.

 

[torquil]

That looks like a major stretch (to put it mildly) for the vast majority of high-school students in the USA, and even for the vast majority of undergraduate university students.

I agree completely.

 

[ForMyThunder]

I actually have the necessary mathematical requirements, although just skimming through the book, it seems they give a more general definition for manifolds than I am used to, requiring them to be locally homeomorphic to a Banach space rather than Euclidean space. Other than that the math doesn't seem like it would bother me. I am more interested in whether the topics in this book contains enough physics-related material; although symplectic geometry is motivated by classical mechanics, I want a more physical approach than mathematical, something that will give me a solid intuition on the subject of Classical Mechanics.