general

In this book, author covers too many applications in each subject and do not have enough room to explain them in details and thus lost most of beginners. Sure, for teachers, the book looks good because they know subjects so well. However,I think the applications to science and medicine are very interesting and fairly easy ( it depends on who the readers are). I am neither a teacher nor a student. The reason I ran into this book because my daugher took physics in high school using this book so I read it and helped out. Interestingly, My phone did ring quite often at night because many of her friends need to know homeworks' solution. Again, these phone rings support my statement "good for teachers, bad for students(beginners)" In all, the mechanics part ( chap 1 to 9) seems to be good. Fluid and heat and themodynamics are OK. Waves and electricity parts are lousy. I need to consult Halliday text book. Optics is good, but not enough support for problems solving.

By the way, the study guide to go with this book written by Joseph Boyle is useless.

I used Giancoli as my primary text in high school, and found it to be a superb text. I think those complaining of a lack of worked problems are missing the entire point of this text and the essence of studying physics. This book is about understanding physics principles and the equations you use to solve physics problems. You will find that with this understanding (certainly provided by this excellent text), the need for mindless ploughing through physics problems is lost. You will be able to solve physics problems on the basis of your conceptual understanding of the problems. So many students rely on rote learning and repetition by doing hundreds of questions. Sure, you might be able to attack similar problems for the next week or so, but as soon as you stop practicing, the skill is lost. True mastery of physics comes from appreciation of principles, not mere recognition of patterns in problems...this text will help you achieve such an appreciation.

I am a student at a university who has been forced to wade through this book, with little prior knowledge of the topic. The explanations for the theories and concepts are not incredible, but suffice. The problems, however, are torture. Simply having a couple of novice examples throughout the chapters, and then being thrown into the problems at the end with no help but for the ODD answers at the back of the text is not helpful, and not conducive to learning. Frustration is not a good method to get people to understand and/or enjoy a topic. I would not recommend this book for the novice, but can see how it can be used as a good reference book for those of more learning in the topic. A solutions manual really does need to exist, as that is how one learns this subject, through trial and error, and the answers in the back are simply not enough.