Rating: 
Summary: well written
Review: Great book, well written, great organization, one of the best books for classroom.
Very good and practical examples. You'll actually see how knowing a little bit of physics can help you understand your usage of daily appliances, and you can participate in intelligent converstaions without sounding silly!
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I admit, I bought this book because my professor told us to ... but this is by far one of the best Physics books I've read.
It's written in a language that we understand and it had tones of photos/graphs/demos as well as examples out of real life.Have you ever studies some laws of physics or math and wondered to yourself "... and why exactly do I need to know this?", or asked someone "when would I use this formula?".
Guess what? The answer is in this book!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Introductory book!
Review: I used this book in my four-quarter introductory physics sequence in college. This book does exactly what it's meant to do: give the reader an introduction to the concepts of physics. The book is more qualitative than quantitative, and uses only basic calculus that the student should be learning at the same time they are taking an introductory phsyics course. The book is very colloqual, and is a good read. Some reviews complain that the book isn't rigorous enough, and glosses over material. They forget that this book is only meant to be an introduction to the ideas and basics of physics. Mathematical rigor should wait for upper division courses. Other reviews claim the book assumes too much of the student. I disagree. The book rarely goes beyond basic calculus. Some ideas may be unintuitive, but you just need to wrap your mind around them. Some of the problems are definitely tricky, but they help develop problem solving skills. Overall the book is a great reference on the concepts of phsyics. I still refer to it when I forget why a certain thing works a certain way.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Introductory book!
Review: I used this book in my four-quarter introductory physics sequence in college. This book does exactly what it's meant to do: give the reader an introduction to the concepts of physics. The book is more qualitative than quantitative, and uses only basic calculus that the student should be learning at the same time they are taking an introductory phsyics course. The book is very colloqual, and is a good read. Some reviews complain that the book isn't rigorous enough, and glosses over material. They forget that this book is only meant to be an introduction to the ideas and basics of physics. Mathematical rigor should wait for upper division courses. Other reviews claim the book assumes too much of the student. I disagree. The book rarely goes beyond basic calculus. Some ideas may be unintuitive, but you just need to wrap your mind around them. Some of the problems are definitely tricky, but they help develop problem solving skills. Overall the book is a great reference on the concepts of phsyics. I still refer to it when I forget why a certain thing works a certain way.
Rating: 
Summary: blehhh
Review: Like the other reviewer from UCB, I had to use Giancoli for two semesters of physics, and this book did not help me one bit. All it did was make me feel completely helpless. The explanations of most concepts are pretty clear and concise. The problem is when you get to the problems. Most of the practice problems at the end of the chapters are much harder than the level at which the actual text covers the physics. As another reviewer said, this book may be good if you've taken a rigorous Honors Physics or AP Physics class in high school, but not everyone has. If your high school only offered a regular college-prep physics class (non-calculus based at that), you will suffer from all the knowledge that it is assumed you can automatically derive or figure out (as if it were common sense) on your own. I highly regret not looking for other, better, physics textbooks at the time I took my introductory physics classes. I urge anyone who doesn't feel like they already have a good solid background in calculus-based physics, and is assigned this book, to go and find one that explains things in a more in-depth way. Physics is all about the problems, if you can't do the problems then you're screwed in the class. This book does not help you figure out how to solve problems.
Rating: 
Summary: An inadequate introduction to physics
Review: Physics without vectors and calculus (and hence, vector calculus) is a nightmare. Relying on special cases where symmetry allows you only to consider convenient angles and where interesting little tools like Stokes' theorem allow you to resolve Maxwell's equations into dot products perhaps may be convenient for the student only seeking to cop out of any real calculation, but is a nightmare for the student actually trying to learn the material. In the sections on electromagnetism, Giancoli considers only special cases where he first tells you, for instance, how to find the E field of a ring on a plane, and then, using that knowledge, how to find the field of a cylinder and very slightly more complicated objects. It is true that he states important formulas, like the Biot-Savart law, in their correct, vector calculus form, but then he goes on to treat the student as if he had never seen vectors before and has only a rudimentary knowledge of integration, and thus must be pampered so that he's only dealing with situations of very high symmetry where a lot of things cancel out. It is true that the good physicist reduces his problems to the most simple form possible, but he does so with the knowledge of how difficult the calculation can be -- knowing the general form of being able to calculate the E field for ANY charge distribution, for instance, but then being able to draw from his own knowledge of symmetry and/or ingenuity to reduce a difficult problem to an easy one. A student who only integrates over sphere his whole life will be unprepared for any real-world theoretical applications -- for he is a specialist in spheres only! With the equations being over-simplified, Giancoli is able to cover a lot more material than an E&M class that concentrates on how to do the equations in their most general form, thus packing in a year or more of material into less than a semester. This confuses the bright student, leaving her wondering how all the ideas and equations he states and half-derives have any connection with one another --- while in a class where the treatment of the material was more thorough, she would be taught the most general form from the outset. If you are an instructor looking to assign this book, don't let yourself be blinded by its seemingly easy mathematics. It, in fact, is harder to learn from Giancoli than it is from a book that does a more thorough treatment, and I guarantee your students will forget everything they did in your class by the next semester. I, in fact, highly recommend a different introductory book that does an excellent job -- a book called "University Physics" by Reese.
Rating:
Summary: NO theory but lots of problem solving
Review: The mechanics part is excellent, but the theory vanishes as you reach the electricity and magnetism part. If you're not a physics major, just want to go through the course as fast as you can, and want to get a good grade, this book might work for you becasue it does lots of problem solving and simple "plug and chugs." But if you're a physics or math or science major, the book is pretty boring because you already know how to plug in numbers into equations--and that's all the book does! I thought the mechanics part was pretty good, but the electomagnetic part just had bunch of equations without enough explanation as to what they mean. I got an "A" both semesters but didn't learn anything the second semester. I heard the third semester was pretty easy. Overall, if you can find a good teacher who covers lots of theory, the book would probably work perfect, but if you want to study on your own, then you won't learn anything.
Rating:
Summary: NO theory but lots of problem solving
Review: The mechanics part is excellent, but the theory vanishes as you reach the electricity and magnetism part. If you're not a physics major, just want to go through the course as fast as you can, and want to get a good grade, this book might work for you becasue it does lots of problem solving and simple "plug and chugs." But if you're a physics or math or science major, the book is pretty boring because you already know how to plug in numbers into equations--and that's all the book does! I thought the mechanics part was pretty good, but the electomagnetic part just had bunch of equations without enough explanation as to what they mean. I got an "A" both semesters but didn't learn anything the second semester. I heard the third semester was pretty easy. Overall, if you can find a good teacher who covers lots of theory, the book would probably work perfect, but if you want to study on your own, then you won't learn anything.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: then again I had an excellent instructor.
My professor has a Ph.D from MIT and he knew everything there was to know about Engineering level Physics. The book was OK in that it covered the basics and then some, but the problems in the book required a little more effort to solve. Look at it this way, imagine the book as the CIA feeding info to soldiers being dropped into a hot LZ. The CIA tells them where to find the hostages, and where the terrorists are, and what weapons they have. After finishing a chapter, you should imagine the entire platoon stranded in the middle of nowhere with the enemy surrounding them. The book gives you an example and you THINK you understand the concept. The author then throws a lot of curveballs and you're not prepared to handle them. I found some of the more difficult problems VERY puzzling and we had to ask the instructor for help many times.
Rating: 
Summary: Physics boot camp
Review: This is a good book, but I hate it. I am in my second semester of physics at a Cal State school and have used this book for both mechanics, and now electricity and magnetism. This book excels at forcing the student to develop problem solving skills. As others have pointed out: there is little theory. Each chapter starts with, maybe, a few pages of the basic theory (these sections can be quite interesting) and then immediately gets into the equations. I love the conceptual side of physics, having read about the subject since I was a kid. But there is nothing interesting about calculating the electric field around a cylinder, or, better yet, the force of friction on a box sliding down an incline. But hey, we need to learn this stuff. And with this book, you WILL learn it. In all honesty, I don't think that a physics book for science and engineering students could be written any better. Tedious, thorough, and forces you to learn the material no matter how dry it is. Thank God I'm not a physics major.
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