~ Physics (Early) Undergraduate Textbook Recommendations ~

In this video I will be giving some textbook recommendations that might come in handy for people pursuing an undergraduate degree in physics. Particularly textbooks related to the earlier courses of the first/second year of university. I hope these recommendations turn out to be useful in your own personal situation as to your studies. Feel free to leave a comment with your recommendations and feedback!

[@Crow_Nim]

1:22 - Fundamentals of Physics by David Halliday and Robert Resnick. 2:50 - Crash Course in Python by Eric Matthes. 4:30 - Thomas' Calculus by Maurice D. Weir and Joel Hass. 6:31 - Foundations of Astrophysics by Barbara Ryden and Bradley M. Peterson. 7:55 - Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering by K. F. Riley, M. P. Hobson, and S.J. Bence. Hope these help. Thanks for the video mate. I got some heavy reading to do now lol.

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

Nice! Hope the recommendations are of help!

[@user-ys2sr6ym5g]

nice

[@JamesAdams-ev6fc]

Very nice video that pulls no punches. You’re definitely better off reading a few real books on the subject than a lot of popular books that shy away from the actual material.

[@homerthompson416]

I blasted through the problems in Halliday, Resnick, & Walker Fundamentals of Physics my freshman year, they were so much fun. Really enjoyed that book. Resnick's Special Relativity is outstanding too, though I think my favorite SR book is the first edition of Taylor & Wheeler's Spacetime Physics. Well-written and easy to understand if you put in the work and some challenging problems too.

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

I also really enjoyed Resnick’s Relativity book! Maybe I’ll mention it in another video.

[@Epic-so3ek]

underated video goddamn. Just so everyone knows, there are plenty of courses online to learn python and some of them are from universities. The programming side of computer science currently lends itself quite well to youtube tutorials and you'll find 100% of pros watch at least 1 youtube video on programming a week. So if you want to save on the cost of a book you can do that. I personally find books to be better though myself (and most actual professionals would agree), but just so you know it exists since it's free. Also if you're doing anything in science you may want to consider learning fortran at some point if you want to be a researcher. The older people working in science don't want to learn a new language (or to port existing code), so fortran is used even though it's from the 60's. It is significantly harder than python and what you learn from one language won't really translate to the other, and I'm 90% sure fortran is quite a bit less used.

[@aryanpandey8262]

Finally u are back with my favourite genre🇮🇳 I Love your videos related to science

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

Hi Aryan! Glad to see you enjoyed the video! I’d definitely try my best to keep more science content coming.

[@j1d7s]

Thanks for the video, these are some very solid recommendations, the Astrophysics book by Barbara Ryden goes on my to-read list. Regarding mathematics, I found "Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences" by Mary Boas to be very useful, too, regardless of its age. It covers a lot of ground and has very good explanations and especially motivations for concepts and techniques. I got a used and quite cheap copy.

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

Glad you liked the video! Hope you get the most out of the Barbara Ryden book. You can look into her Cosmology book as well. And thank you for the Mary Boas book recommendation! I’m going to look into this one today. Cheers!

[@jkang471]

Excellent contents!!!

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

Glad you enjoyed the video!

[@edenvasev1749]

Instant subscribe, sir! Very useful tips and recommendations. I am going to be a freshman this year majoring in physics and I need some additional tips if possible. You have mentioned University Physics and my guess is the one by Young and Freedman, my question is - is this book enough in order to give me the basics of mechanics so I can then move on to Classical Mechanics by Taylor? What would you recommend?

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

Thank you so much for the positive feedback Eden! Greatly appreciate it. I’d definitely say yes to your question. At my university we used University Physics for classical mechanics as well. It is sufficiently dense for it. Though one called Classical Mechanics by R. Douglas Gregory is also pretty nice (though it’s roughly closer to Taylor).

[@edenvasev1749]

@@thecaribbeanbookworm5066 Thank you, thank you so much, sir, and God bless you. I have ordered the one by Gregory, I read the Amazon reviews and it's highly regarded as very detailed and full of important insights that an undergraduate can greatly benefit from. Thank you again.

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

@@edenvasev1749 no problem! I hope you manage to gain the most out of it!

[@BlackThoughts0]

Great video! Did you feel the introductory book you recommended taught statistical mechanics well? I’m trying to teach myself the topic as a graduate student working in geochemistry.

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

Hi! I’m glad you enjoyed the video! The introductory book by Resnick covers thermo and statistical mechanics very briefly. Hence, I don’t think it would be of benefit to your purpose. From what I heard through various other physics people online, the book An Introduction to Thermal Physics (Daniel Schroeder) or Concepts in Thermal Physics (Stephen Blundell) seems much better for a thorough undergraduate introduction to the subject. Though on the graduate level I heard that Statistical Mechanics (Raj Pathria) is quite good. I hope that gave you some place to look. Cheers!

[@BlackThoughts0]

@@thecaribbeanbookworm5066 Thanks so much! I'll look into the graduate level book. I'm sure it will have the necessary rigor.

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

@@BlackThoughts0 glad to be of help! Good luck with statistical mechanics.

[@rg8438]

you actually went through the pages. liked that.

[@jorgeperalta1973]

Super goed video, Ik heb genoeg informatie over welke boeken wil ik kopen Top!!!

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

Glad to see that you’ve found it useful. Groetjes!

[@misraaditya9213]

Agree with all the recommendations; can't say much about the Astrophysics one because I haven't read too much on it; however, my personal preferences vary slightly: 1. I have grown to prefer the University Physics book, if you mean the Young and Freedman text. I'd confess I skimmed through passages occasionally, so I'd agree with the volume of that thing being - well - a thing, but I still prefer it, being someone who just learns better by following through the derivations. 2. For Calculus, I prefer Dr Gilbert Strang's three-volume Calculus book (open access on OpenStax). For my CS major, I actually followed through his Linear Algebra book as well. His style of explaining things feels very intuitive and it's easy to follow the reasoning in his books.

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

Hi Misra. Thank you so much for the comment! Love this reply. In regards to University Physics, I have to say that ever since time passed after posting this video, it began to grow on me. Indeed, I also think that it is still very derivation heavy (which I personally love about it), but mainly I like that it introduces so many branches of physics in such a clear fashion. Even condensed matter is covered in it. Which seems to be pretty rare for intro books. Thank you for the Gilbert Strang calculus book name drop. If I made this video a little bit later after having taken linear algebra, I surely would’ve 100% recommend his book on linear algebra. It became by far my favorite book on the subject. Even though the one we mainly used for the course was pretty good (David C Lay), Gilbert Strang’s book was something else. Especially in explaining linear transformations and vector spaces intuitively. Along with the 3blue1brown playlist, it is the best source for linear algebra in my opinion.

[@misraaditya9213]

@@thecaribbeanbookworm5066 Yeah the Lay book is a classic too. Very good, but I'd prefer Strang's if I were to pick a textbook for an intro to linear algebra. 3blue1brown's videos are a gem in building a visual intuition. I watched those before formally starting with linear algebra.

[@jacobharris5894]

As someone that just graduated with a physics degree I still use the University physics book to get an idea of the level physics I and physics II students are taught at, for tutoring purposes. It also helped me with topics I struggled with after taking physics II like electric field calculations for continuous charge distributions. Definitely the best introductory text I own. I still dislike how wordy it is at times and it’s lack of derivations in certain chapters but it’s a far cry from Randal D. Knight’s books.

[@juancarlossanchezveana1812]

Excellent

[@psikeyhackr6914]

How do you analyse the physics of a straight down collapse of a 1400 ft skyscraper without having accurate data on the distributions of steel and concrete? What does the Conservation of Momentum have to do with ANYTHING?

[@gilloon9964]

Tipler and Mosca Physics Arfken and Weber Mathematical Physics

[@etherea9370]

ur very cool!

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

Thank you for the kind comment!

[@marimuthuelakkuvan1011]

Gud ❤

[@Guylovesleep6802]

A question in order to learn calculus which is better Thomas Calculus or Mathematical Methods for physics and engineering

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

I don’t think you will go wrong with either books. Perhaps you can find a PDF for both books and see what you’d prefer. Personally, I preferred using Thomas Calculus when first learning the topic (as the explination and exercises felt more pedagogical and friendly towards first-time learners) and Mathematical Methods as a reference.

[@Guylovesleep6802]

@@thecaribbeanbookworm5066 alrighty then thx

[@kevinlearns1]

What is this song being played in the intro? Really sounds nice.

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

It’s “This is Jamaica”. A parody of “This is America”, and it’s on the channel J nel Comedy.

[@kevinlearns1]

Thank you!@@thecaribbeanbookworm5066

[@roaaahmad3541]

Ineed calculas to read fundamentals of physics?

[@lepidoptera9337]

Yes.

[@shehzanashehzanaali]

This book is available in Pakistan

[@samuelfranco6336]

brow are you an astronomy student?

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

Hey man, more or less yes! I am a physics student.

[@philbaecanyon7820]

That Python book looks like it was written in German

[@thecaribbeanbookworm5066]

Very close. It’s in Dutch.

[@cosmicpsyops4529]

So nothing written by Neil Degrasse Tyson or Bill Nye? 😂

[@aligharaibeh3761]

They're clowns!

[@farzamimran3960]

Tbh I used to listened to those guys when I just started my physics / math journey but the more I learned the more I knew that these guys are just presenters

[@REALdavidmiscarriage]

@@aligharaibeh3761neil tyson is not a clown, bill nye is tho…

[@harsheh]

theyre science communicators not teachers. they have their part do not undermine them

[@xirsixussien7303]

The teach Science to the masses which is very important.