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Title: Theoretical Mechanics for Particles and Continua by Alexander L. Fetter, John Dirk Walecka ISBN: 0-07-020658-9 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math Pub. Date: 01 February, 1980 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $88.75

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Average Customer Rating: 3.33 (3 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: 3.5 Stars -- Good Supplementary Material
Comment: I'm currently taking Professor Fetter's undergraduate mechanics course at Stanford, for which Marion & Thornton's Classical Dynamics is the required text. Professor Fetter provides references to relevant sections in his and other texts as supplementary reading to Marion & Thornton. Of all the others (including Goldstein), his provides the most lucid, complete discussion of several key topics in dynamics:

1. Small Oscillations (coupled oscillators, normal coordinates, eigenvalue problems)

2. Continuous Media (passage from loaded string to continuum limit) 3. Strings/Wave Propagation (e.g. d'Alembert, Bernoulli)

These are the sections I found useful. Others were not. I recommend this book as useful auxiliary material to standard texts like M&T. The level is slightly above M&T, but I found the use of matrix notation (vs. ungodly summations) very helpful. And Professor Fetter is a great teacher!

- A Sophomore Physics Major

Rating: 2
Summary: Useful only for its continuum mechanics coverage
Comment: The first half of this text covers the standard graduate mechanics cirriculum, while the second half covers strings, membranes, and other continuum topics. The section on particle mechanics is poorly done: the entire section on Hamilton's method is bad, and the treatment of the Hamilton-Jacobi method is disastrous (of all the topics to mess up!). The discussions offer no insight into the material being presented; both the small oscillations chapter and the Hamilton mechanics chapter are simply collections of formulae. I also disagree with their approach to Lagrangian dynamics. They, like Goldstein, begin with a tedious discussion of virtual work and D'Alembert's principle. I prefer Landau's approach- just introduce the action and get on with it. I don't believe that anything is learned from their method.

Much of the book reads as if the authors are just piecing together the relevant sections from other texts, while removing the copied authors' insights. Indeed, they're caught red-handed in chapter 1. Not only are problems 1.17, 1.18 directly from Landau's text, the wording is identical, the problems are divided into the same parts, and just as problem 1.18 directly follows 1.17 in this text, it directly follows the same problem in Landau's book.

This book really doesn't do anything in partcle mechanics well. It's examples are trivial (a common problem), and modern methods (see V.I. Arnold's book and a dynamical systems text) are omitted. There's no reason to use this for particle mechanics when Landau's beautiful text is available. And although I've never used it, I'd wager that Landau's continuum mechanics book is better than this text's coverage...

Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent introductory Graduate text in classical mechanics
Comment: In the same spirt as Herbert Goldstein's "Classical Mechanics" (second edition), Fetter and Walecka covers the basics of graduate classical mechanics, while extending the treatment of the material into its quantum counterparts. The problems and examples, while not as difficult as Goldstein's, are appropriate for a 1st year graduate class.

Of exceptional note is the chapter entitled "Strings" which extends the treament of most of classical mechanics into the quantum regime. This section also gives the student an excellent first introduction to the variational and perturbation methods for finding exact and approximate solutions.

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