Statistical Mechanics - Books suggestions

[JRPB]

I'm taking Statistical Mechanics this semester. I already took Thermodynamics, covering the first three laws (0,1,2) at the level of Fermi's Thermodynamics book (and other similar ones). My Stat. Mech. teacher is a condensed matter experimentalist and he's boss at what he does, no question about it. However, on the teaching side, well... I have a lot of work to do on my own. I always try to not stay within the confines of my course's program and learn whatever else I can during that period. But, whenever entering a new topic (new for me), I need guidance to avoid getting lost in the vast, vast world of physics. I doubt I'm going to get that from my teacher unless I ask the proper questions (which are hard to come by, given his teaching style). Only the first few classes have passed, but I suspect it's hardly going to get any better (I sure hope it does!)

I bought these books: "Statistical Mechanics" by R. Pathria. "Intro. to Modern Statistical Mechanics" by Chandler and "Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics" by Greiner.

I was wondering if you could offer some advice as to what material/books to use in order to complement my course and pretty much, teach myself undergraduate level Statistical Mechanics.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. I'm in my senior year, taking all the fun stuff (ED, QM, SM and one last Mathematical Methods course).

 

[DrewD]

Be careful not to get lost by reading too many different books, but...
http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/~sethna/StatMech/
I've heard this is good and the pdf version is free (if you like it enough, buy the hard copy).

You will need to ask lots of questions. Perhaps that should always be true, but I thought it more important with stat mech. Find out what the next lecture will be and read ahead. Then you can ask about your questions instead of waiting for the professor to say something confusing.

 

[JRPB]

Thanks for the suggestion.

For anyone else interested, I found a very promising book: Statistical Physics by Reif (the smaller one, Vol. 5 of Berkeley's series).