physics

The book is good and very clear. If you want to learn QM to apply it to statistical mechanics, condensed matter or solid state physics, etc. this book will suffice. But if you intend to specialize in field theory or superstrings, for instance, I recommend you to study QM from Ballantine. Sakurai is pretty good but he presents QM as if it were a set of rules that cannot be changed. I think that's not very interesting for a future theoretical physicist. Besides, he omits certain mathematical details (such as the existence of a complete set of eigenvectors for self-adjoint operators even in the case of continuous spectra, in rigged Hilbert Space or under Von Newmann formalism). In one point Sakurai is really wrong: he says that the use of self-adjoint ops. is needed in order that its eigenvalues are real. That's incidental: self-adjointness is crucial not because the eigval are real but because its eigenvectors form a complete set.
One thing is certain: using Sakurai you'll learn how to solve problems and apply QM to numerous situations, but you'll miss the foundations of the theory.

Sakurai's quantum mechanics textbook is the one with which I started understanding quantum mechanics. It is, however, not for beginners in the field. But if you are familiar with basic quantum concepts (wave-particle dualism, uncertainty principle, and maybe even some easy tunneling phenomena with wave functions and boundary conditions), you will certainly enjoy Sakurai's book.

The book starts with the presenation of spin-1/2 systems and the Stern-Gerlach experiment. Throughout the text, reference is made to this very compelling example of quantum systems. Oerators are related to symmetry transformations, and the text is really both straightforward and well structurized.

But then, the argument given by my fellow reviewer Doug Irving is quite correct - and that's why I can give only 4 stars for the book. Especially somewhere in the perturbation series the quality of the explanations and the argumentative clarity suddenly deteriorates. Finally, the scattering theory consists mainly only of formula with no further insight from helpful comments.

Nonetheless, in my opinion the first chapters are written very well and can thus be recommended to any graduate student in physics. This is also due to the fact, that the book focuses on the key issues of quantum mechanics and leaves out less important material. What is the use of a 2-volume 1000-page quantum mechanics book if the average student remembers at most 10% of it. These 10% are contained in "Modern Quantum Mechanics".

Well, I've read all of this book some years ago and, at that time (while learning for my QM I and QM II exams) I used this book together with L.D.Landau (non relativistic QM), W.Greiner (vol. I, II and some of III), F. Schwabl (QM) and the everused R.Shankar (QM). In the following years I went on using J.Sakurai several times as a reference. Today, I think that J.Sakurai book is one of the best choices for learning QM: his treatment of spin theory in QM is still one of the best (probably the best!). Just the last 2 chapters seem to me a bit uneven compared to the rest of the book. I must also say: if you have to learn QM, then you'll have to use Sakurai together with another book that tells you something more about the introductory part of QM (ondulatory mechanics and so on: for example, a good choice would be M.Born, Gasiorowicz, Greiner vol. I, or Schwabl), but J.Sakurai and L.D.Landau are, in my opinion, probably still the best textbooks on the core part of QM.