Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Mechanics

Rating:
Summary: Good and short: really good on field momentum.
Review: I read physics books in my spare time, and what I've found are the best ones are short, good books: if they're short you stand a chance of getting through them, and then if they're good you can pick up the essentials of the subject quickly.

This book is both. If you're looking for a primary textbook, you might be looking for something different, but for a reference to the concepts it's short and sweet: eg. what are canonical transformations, why are they defined the way they are and what is their importance.

What's particularly mind-blowing is the 5 page discussion of field momentum. That's the qA term in the hamiltonian for a charge q in a magnetic field (vector potential A). This form of the hamiltonian always puzzled me: Calkin explains the meaning of the qA term beautifully. The book is worth getting for this alone.

Rating:
Summary: Very Brief
Review: We are using this book in a third-year undergraduate course in classical mechanics. I find it alright for an in-class course, but I would definetely not recommend it to anyone planning to study by him/herself. The text simply is not made for that.
Judging by what I see in other books, this text has a fairly thorough coverage.
It is written VERY short and you want to have a pen and paper ready to understand the analysis. Once you do that, it should be alright.
The problems are of the very-short-but-sometimes-algebraically-intense kind, the class record being at 52 (!) hand written pages for three problems in chapter 6. But they are possible and, aside from the algrebra, not all that difficult.