Resnick and Halliday which book I should choose?

  • Context: Intro Physics 
  • Thread starter Thread starter ricky33
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Book Halliday Resnick
Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
5 replies · 7K views
ricky33
Messages
57
Reaction score
0
Resnick and Halliday have many physics books and they have more than 6 named fundamental of physics I don't know which one I should choose they have many editions for each book and they have the same name .
 
on Phys.org
Last edited by a moderator:
ricky33 said:
Resnick and Halliday have many physics books and they have more than 6 named fundamental of physics I don't know which one I should choose they have many editions for each book and they have the same name .

It doesn't really matter much. Halliday and Resnick type books try to give an overview of a lot of physics. This overview is not deep. You will go very deep in all aspects of physics in later physics courses. So the goal of Halliday and Resnick is to cover things very broadly, to introduce you with physical thinking and to make you aware of the basic concepts. In that sense, all editions would serve quite well. I would go for the one that is cheapest.
 
  • Like
Likes   Reactions: vanhees71 and jedishrfu
One other thing to think about is some used student copies of this book may be marked up with highlighter which can distract from the reading experience.

Also ABE Books is a good resource for finding used copies with descriptions on book quality:

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=halliday+resnick&sts=t&tn=fundamentals+of+physics

Another possible book resource is the IB Physics book by KA Tsokos, its a bit smaller than Halliday but packaged quite well for freshman level physics:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521138213/?tag=pfamazon01-20

and lastly, there the free books by Benjamin Crowell at:

www.lightandmatter.com
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Yeah, I liked the green book too. It came out a few years after I graduated. The standard at the time was the royal blue book. Our school used another authors book which wasn't as good and we were only 15 miles from RPI where Resnick taught. Go figure!