Which Textbook is Considered the Worst by PF Users?

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micromass said:
Anyway, other books that deserve to be here:

[...]
Ballentine's QM book
I hope you're joking.

If not, then you should change the title of this thread to "Which textbook should not be read by mathematicians?"
 
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For a decade or more, there has been a theoretical physics culture rising, where rigorous definitions are given and mentioned, but not used. It is unfortunate in my opinion, because the culture has been designed to produce a false sense of rigourness. It would be better to do non-rigor computations, and know that the computations are non-rigor. "When you don't know something, know that you don't know."

Everytime I have challenged the habit of mentioning rigor definitions without using them, I have been lead to one authority: Ballentine. He's the one behind this...
 
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micromass said:
I only listed the book because you love it more than you love me.

Sorry but Wald's GR book has a very special place in my heart that no one can replace.
 
I like almost all textbooks, I am very forgiving with authors. But Rudin deserves 10 years of pain for writing his cryptic progress-through-pain books. I've only seen the first two but I can't imagine a less pedagogical way of writing.

But the truly worst-written textbook I've seen is Enderton's "Introduction to Mathematical Logic". Stunted is being too kind. I'll give some examples of the writing:

There are no specific prerequisites aside from a willingness to function at a certain level of abstraction and rigor.
Logic is more abstract than airplanes.
The reader already knows how to think.

And if this is also about books that are not the worst but are highly (or not so highly) overrated, I must include Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right. It goes deeply into the subject which is of course nice, but complex linear transformations are treated in a dictionary style, this is the case when F is a complex vector space, etc. I don't just want to know what is the case, I want to understand it please.
 
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verty said:
I like almost all textbooks, I am very forgiving with authors. But Rudin deserves 10 years of pain for writing his cryptic progress-through-pain books. I've only seen the first two but I can't imagine a less pedagogical way of writing.

But the truly worst-written textbook I've seen is Enderton's "Introduction to Mathematical Logic". Stunted is being too kind. I'll give some examples of the writing:And if this is also about books that are not the worst but are highly (or not so highly) overrated, I must include Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right. It goes deeply into the subject which is of course nice, but complex linear transformations are treated in a dictionary style, this is the case when F is a complex vector space, etc. I don't just want to know what is the case, I want to understand it please.

I seem to recall a similar type of "humor" in Leary's Friendly Introduction to Mathematical Logic. I think mathematical logicians may have been infected by the computer scientists.
 
WannabeNewton said:
His QM book is actually excellent and I haven't yet learned enough QFT to use his QFT volumes but needless to say it has near universal acclaim from researchers so I can't expect any less.

Incidentally, one complaint I've heard about Weinberg's QFT is that he uses the term "spontaneous breaking of a gauge symmetry". He knows what he means, but I do agree it is misleading, since a gauge symmetry cannot be spontaneously broken in the usual sense, as it would imply that the ground state does not have the gauge symmetry, even though the Hamiltonian and Hilbert space do. Of course Weinberg doesn't mean that. He means that there is spontaneous breaking of a global symmetry, and without the gauge symmetry there are Goldstone bosons, but when the gauge symmetry is added, the Goldstone bosons go away.

Here's an example: http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0503400. (DrDu doesn't agree with Greiter, but I have read it carefully and believe Greiter is right, though I don't think I could defend all the steps now off the top of my head.) Anyway, Kibble also uses the term, and explains why it is misleading http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble_mechanism.
 
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atyy said:
Purcell, Electricity and Magnetism, 3e
Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics, 3e

Jackson explains why his book is terrible in the preface :)


Griffith's Electromagnetics book, I thought it jumped around too much and gave students mis-leading methodologies to solve problems.
 
I guess I should explain the 3e specification :smile: Those use SI units, whereas the previous used cgs. Actually, I prefer SI just because I learned it that way, and had some difficulty with a class using Purcell 2e. But the amusing thing is that Jackson reveals that Purcell and him and a pact to use cgs, and writes in his 3e, that he has now betrayed his friend :cry:!
 
Putting Purcell and Griffiths in this list is misleading to say the least, in my opinion. These are without a doubt two of the most excellent books on electromagnetism to have been written. The third edition of Purcell is particularly excellent, the addition of SI units is such a trivial issue.

The list is about books which are so horribly written that no one should read them. Purcell and Griffiths are by no means examples of such books. I don't think micromass meant for the examples to be hyperboles. If we included every book that had a small caveat then this list would include every textbook ever written.
 
Essentials of Geometry by Steffensen

Not enough explanations ans exercises to practice.
 
atyy said:
Well, Jackson did his 3e, but Purcell didn't, so one could say Purcell 3e is not Purcell :)

But ironically the 3rd edition of Purcell is infinitely better than the previous editions :)

I say this mostly because David Morin added tons of worked examples and worked problems along with his (in)famous 3 star problems, some of which took me an inordinate amount of thinking to solve and others which I just couldn't solve on my own period. And David Morin is well-known for his really hard problems, given his excellent mechanics book (see also his extremely fun daily challenges: https://www.physics.harvard.edu/academics/undergrad/problems). So imo Morin saved Purcell from being cast into oblivion given that most if not all of the original problems in Purcell were merely relegated to 2 star problems in Morin's revision.
 
I want to see Morin do Kleppner and Kolenkow 2e then, and relegate their present problems to 1 star ...

Wait, there's already KK 2e ? What was wrong with 1e that they had to revise it?
 
micromass said:
I have heard that the second edition just made the first edition worse...

Backward causation!
 
atyy said:
I want to see Morin do Kleppner and Kolenkow 2e then, and relegate their present problems to 1 star ...

Well in Morin's mechanics books all of the problems in Kleppner would safely be categorized as either 1 star or 2 star; indeed many of the problems in Kleppner appear as such in Morin's book. Mind you Morin's mechanics book goes up to 4 stars in problem difficulty. Yup.
 
WannabeNewton said:
Well in Morin's mechanics books all of the problems in Kleppner would safely be categorized as either 1 star or 2 star; indeed many of the problems in Kleppner appear as such in Morin's book. Mind you Morin's mechanics book goes up to 4 stars in problem difficulty. Yup.

:bugeye:
 
atyy said:
Do the problems in Morin become easy in the Lagrangian formalism?

Only very few of them. Off the top of my head a problem like a sphere rolling without slipping on an accelerating inclined plane would be easier in the Lagrangian formalism considerably, and also problems like a small cylinder rolling back and forth inside a larger cylinder which is itself free to rotate from back reaction, but for example the problem of a gas particle bouncing back and forth between receding walls, the infinite Atwood machine, or a rain droplet falling through the sky wouldn't even be possible to do with the Lagrangian formalism.
 
WannabeNewton said:
Putting Purcell and Griffiths in this list is misleading to say the least, in my opinion. These are without a doubt two of the most excellent books on electromagnetism to have been written. The third edition of Purcell is particularly excellent, the addition of SI units is such a trivial issue.

The list is about books which are so horribly written that no one should read them. Purcell and Griffiths are by no means examples of such books. I don't think micromass meant for the examples to be hyperboles. If we included every book that had a small caveat then this list would include every textbook ever written.

Your opinion, I have taught out of Griffiths, not my favorite book on E&M, much prefer Wangsness at that level, I think the presentation is much better and the methodologies taught to solve problems are not misleading. I felt that Griffiths hand waved the solution to important problems without really sitting down and solving them in the correct manner.
 
WannabeNewton said:
Only very few of them. Off the top of my head a problem like a sphere rolling without slipping on an accelerating inclined plane would be easier in the Lagrangian formalism considerably, and also problems like a small cylinder rolling back and forth inside a larger cylinder which is itself free to rotate from back reaction, but for example the problem of a gas particle bouncing back and forth between receding walls, the infinite Atwood machine, or a rain droplet falling through the sky wouldn't even be possible to do with the Lagrangian formalism.

I'm retreating to Halliday and Resnick.
 
Here's one thing that mystifies me: http://www.projectalevel.co.uk/as_a2_maths/integration appears to define integration as the reverse of differentiation. One may (wrongly, presumably) get a similar impression from the A-level syllabus itself http://www.cie.org.uk/images/92083-2014-syllabus.pdf . I'm not a mathematician, but to me this seems so horrible as to be wrong (at least spiritually). If integration is defined as the reverse of differentiation, then there is no fundamental theorem of calculus, isn't it?

Shouldn't integration be defined as a sum (like an area, in probability)? And differentiation as a rate of change (slope)? Then the fundamental theorem of calculus can exist.
 
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atyy said:
Here's one thing that mystifies me: http://www.projectalevel.co.uk/as_a2_maths/integration appears to define integration as the reverse of differentiation. One may (wrongly, presumably) get a similar impression from the A-level syllabus itself http://www.cie.org.uk/images/92083-2014-syllabus.pdf. I'm not a mathematician, but to me this seems so horrible as to be wrong (at least spiritually). If integration is defined as the reverse of differentiation, then there is no fundamental theorem of calculus, isn't it?

Shouldn't integration be defined as a sum (like an area, in probability)? And differentiation as a rate of change (slope)? Then the fundamental theorem of calculus can exist.

At that level I feel like defining integrals in terms of anti-derivatives is okay. It focuses on the intuitively accessible computational aspect, not the more abstract concept of a limiting sum. It's straightforward, this is how you do it (simple rules of anti-differentiation) and this is what it's used for (finding area). Then, possibly for the most interested, you may prove that it's equivalent to the riemann sum (probably erroneously, like many "proofs" are in textbooks at that level). But I don't really see the difference between defining it as a riemann sum, or to show that it's equivalent to a riemann sum, when you're not at all working with the theoretical machinery behind it.

As a side note, I recall that upon learning integration I found great pleasure in reading the proof of that the derivative A'(x) of the cumulative area function A(x) denoting the area under f(x) from x = a to x was f(x), thus justifying integration as anti-derivation. This is was not a correct proof however, as we didn't actually define area under a function.
 
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Dr Transport said:
I felt that Griffiths hand waved the solution to important problems without really sitting down and solving them in the correct manner.

That reminds me of a lecturer's catch-phrase in a course on differential equations (for mathematicians not physicists): "the best way to solve this is to look at it until you see what the solution is".

Aside from getting marks for tests and homework, it doesn't matter much how you get to the answer so long as you can prove it's the right answer. In the long run, developing correct intuitions will beat learning to plug and chug.
 
Dr Transport said:
I felt that Griffiths hand waved the solution to important problems without really sitting down and solving them in the correct manner.

Can you give an example? Griffiths is not my favorite book on the subject either, but I'm not sure I can recall what you're talking about.
 
ZombieFeynman said:
Can you give an example? Griffiths is not my favorite book on the subject either, but I'm not sure I can recall what you're talking about.

I can't quote a specific page and example, but I remember him setting up more than on e problem in spherical coordinates from the get go, other than Gauss's law, it is my opinion that you should always set up any electrostatics or magnetostatics problem in rectangular coordinates and then change coordinates, more than likely you will get the right answer, if you try to set up a problem in say spherical coordinates and spherical vectors, [itex]\vec{r}, \vec{\theta}, \vec{\phi}[/itex], most of the time you will get it wrong.
 
Dr Transport said:
...it is my opinion that you should always set up any electrostatics or magnetostatics problem in rectangular coordinates and then change coordinates, more than likely you will get the right answer, if you try to set up a problem in say spherical coordinates and spherical vectors, [itex]\vec{r}, \vec{\theta}, \vec{\phi}[/itex], most of the time you will get it wrong.

I can honestly say neither I nor any of my friends who took electrodynamics with me have ever once had this issue. We never once got an answer wrong in a homework problem (tests are a different thing entirely of course!) and we always set up spherical or cylindrical coordinates from the get go depending on the symmetries at hand. I really don't see a point in starting with Cartesian coordinates and then transforming to a different coordinate system.
 

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