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Title: Thermal Physics (2nd Edition) by Charles Kittel, Herbert Kroemer ISBN: 0-7167-1088-9 Publisher: W H Freeman & Co. Pub. Date: March, 1980 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $81.60 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.28 (18 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Overrated
Comment: I used to think this was a great book, and it certainly sparked my interest in statistical mechanics. But then I read genuinely good books on statistical mechanics, such as Landau and Lifschitz or Mayer, and realized how much I was missing. It's now hard for me to take seriously a book on statistical mechanics that never tells you what the Ergodic Theorem is, or says anything at all about classical methods of statistical mechanics -- which are still very relevant because of the difficulties of the pure quantum mechanical approach. It's also frustrating to try to look up anything here. As other reviewers have noted, the book is quite badly organized and topics that ought to be treated in one place, such as the ideal gas, are scattered over several chapters. The discussion of phase transitions is particularly bad. Such important topics as the connection between the microcanonical, canonical, and grand canonical ensembles is never elucidated, and you won't see any discussion of such traditionally important topics as the cluster or virial expansions. I have to speculate that this is because the authors are solid state physicists who can't be bothered with an adequate treatment of real gases, liquids, or plasmas. The upshot is that I've come around from thinking this was a really great book to realizing that it's really pretty awful.
Rating: 1
Summary: Unclear, unmotivated gibberish
Comment: I prefer my physics books to be motivated, precise, and mathematically rigorous. K+K is none of these. The organization is poor, with important material scattered throughout multiple chapters. The problems at the end of the chapter are too easy and numerical. Even after doing all of the problems, I still don't feel like I understand stat mech. The "derivations" are a joke, assumptions are left unstated, and difficulties are hand-waved away without even a mention.
Rating: 2
Summary: Comprehensive, but a BAD book
Comment: I'm using this book for an undergraduate thermo class. It is one of the worst textbooks I have used. It may be large and comprehensive, but the organization is horrible. The book is extremely unclear, and when you start to do the problems at the end of the chapter, you really see how little got through to you. The problems are often vague and hard to understand, which adds to the problem. You can read it over and over and still get neither the math of thermodynamics, nor the physics behind it.
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Title: Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by David J. Griffiths ISBN: 0131244051 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 02 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $108.00 |
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Title: Introduction to Electrodynamics (3rd Edition) by David J. Griffiths ISBN: 013805326X Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 30 December, 1998 List Price(USD): $108.00 |
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Title: Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems by Jerry B. Marion, Stephen T. Thornton ISBN: 0030973023 Publisher: Brooks Cole Pub. Date: 17 January, 1995 List Price(USD): $129.95 |
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Title: Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics by Frederick, Reif ISBN: 0070518009 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math Pub. Date: 01 June, 1965 List Price(USD): $98.12 |
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Title: Schaum's Outline of Quantum Mechanics (Schaum's) by Yoav Peleg, Reuven Phini, Eliahu Zaarur, Reuven Pnini, Elyahu Zaarur ISBN: 0070540187 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Trade Pub. Date: 30 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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