Schaum's Outlines: Math & Physics for College Students

[frb]

Can anyone recommend me some good titles in this sereis about mathemathics and theoretical physics. I'm a college student and I just want to buy some for extra information.
And has anyone used the Schaum's Outline of Calculus? I was looking into buying it, but I read a review that said the book is full of errors.
Thanks in advance.

 

[dextercioby]

Nobody will write better books on physics than Landau & Lifschitz and Feynman.Greiner did a pretty good job,but i wouldn't touch his electrodynamics course.
Sakurai is the best on QM,Goldstein on CM,Weinberg on QFT,Landau & Lifschitz on SM (though K.Huang & B.Diu are interesting too),Jackson on CED...

Daniel.

 

[quantumdude]

Can anyone recommend me some good titles in this sereis about mathemathics and theoretical physics. I'm a college student and I just want to buy some for extra information.

Schaum's outlines are great for practice problems. They have a ton of solved problems, and another ton of supplemental problems with answers. All through college, I bought any Schaum's outlines that were pertinent to the courses I was taking. And in grad school when I took classical mechanics (from Goldstein), we were also required to get 2 Schaum's outlines: Theoretical Mechanics and Lagrangian Dynamics. Both of them were excellent for preparing for the Doctoral Qualifing Exam too.

OK, now for undergrad stuff. I found the following Schaum's outlines most helpful:

College Chemistry
Engineering Mechanics
Thermodynamics
Fluid Mechanics
Heat Transfer
Optics (Really like this one)
Linear Algebra
Matrices
Matrix Operations
Advanced Calculus
Vector Analysis
Complex Variables (Really like this one)
Modern Introductory Differential Equations
Differential Equations
Partial Differential Equations

After college, the best ones that I bought are the two I mentioned for grad level mechanics, as well as Group Theory and Tensor Calculus. I recently (last month) bought the Outlines on Topology and Quantum Mechanics. The QM one is roughly equivalent to a senior level undergrad course, and it looks good.

And has anyone used the Schaum's Outline of Calculus? I was looking into buying it, but I read a review that said the book is full of errors.
Thanks in advance.

I did not use it when I took calculus (didn't know about Schaum's in high school), but I do have it. I don't read it though, so I don't know about any errors. I just use it to take problems from for my students (I teach calculus). I can say though that if you want a bunch of extra problems to solve, then that Outline would serve you well. It may even be beneficial for you to try to spot some of those errors!

 

[rick1138]

The QMbook is OK - definitely not comprehensive enough to use as a primary text, but, for example, there is a great exposition of Clebsch-Gordon coefficients. The two calculus books by Murray Speigel are excellent, the book on Tensor Calculus is the best formulation of classical tensor mechanics that I know. The book on Lagrangian dynamics is worth reading, but lacks a strong theoretical underpinning. General Topology is outstanding, Differential Equations excellent, and I found Partial Differential Equations to be awful - incromprehensible unless you already know the material, and at that point you have no reason to read the book.


As far as mistakes go - you find mistakes in books of every level. There are prabably more mistakes in advanced books than in books of a lower level.

 

[quantumdude]

and I found Partial Differential Equations to be awful - incromprehensible unless you already know the material, and at that point you have no reason to read the book.

That's true. I used this Outline, but I had a really good textbook to go with it (PDE's by Strauss). But I still found this Outline (as well as all the others) useful because of all the extra problems it contains. The more advanced you get, the harder it is to make up well-posed problems. With those found in Schaum's Outlines, you know that the problems are solvable. So, I'd still recommend this one if only for that reason.

 

[Dr Transport]

I think that the Fourier Series Outline is worth the price, I refer to it fairly regularly.

 

[misogynisticfeminist]

i used to like schaum's but i wouldn't touch it now. Its not rigourous enough (most of them). never use it as a stand-alone textbook, but its great as a supplement with all the worked examples...