Classical Mechanics

This is a highly rated undergraduate textbook on classical mechanics. The best feature of this book is that it is written for a sophomore. It only expects students who have taken a year on general physics, and assumes the mathematical background of a typical sophomore. Since classical mechanics is the first serious course in the Physics curriculum, this book presents a very readable and logical book for the students at the right level. Other textbooks, for example Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, are sometimes written for more advanced undergraduates and assume more maturity in Physics. There is no doubt that Taylor’s book is one of the popular Physics textbooks.

In my opinion, I do not really like the overall organization of the book. I think undergraduate classical mechanics can be organized into a few themes, and I prefer a more coherent presentation of these themes such that students can have a better overall picture of classical mechanics. This book feels like there are 16 independent topics put together as 16 chapters. I understand the rationale of this organization. Many Physics curriculum only has 1 semester for classical mechanics, but this book has much more materials for just 1 semester. So, the author put together the core chapters as part 1, and then the more advanced topics comprise the part 2. Instructors can pull out different chapters in different orders to suit their needs. But still, by reading the book as a whole, I prefer a different organization. It is a matter of taste though.

I also do not like some of the "cunning" proofs. Very often, when the author says that it is cunning, I found it not quite illuminating. I think there are better proofs that can elucidate the underlying Physics better. However, this is just a minor issue. Overall, I enjoy reading this book. The physics is clearly explained and presented at an appropriate level for sophomores.

Taylor's book is probably the best to learn mechanics at this level. The book is incredibly easy to read and understand. For physics students who aren't very strong in mathematics, this book develops the necessary machinery along the way, as opposed to putting it all in an appendix or in chapter 1 (but realistically, you probably should have had some acquaintance with ODEs and a little complex analysis by this point). It has some very nice examples and illustrations as well. But like any text, it is not without its flaws:

1.) I feel that it would probably be beneficial to read the book in a slightly different order than it's arranged. For some reason, instead of treating Hamiltonian mechanics immediately after Lagrangian mechanics, as is done in most books, he postpones it for an additional 6 chapters. I can't recall if he explains his reasoning for this, but it's a little strange. Also, chapter 8 on the two-body problem would probably make more sense if you read chapter 9 first.

2.) It's a little bit hand-wavy. This is of course inevitable when trying to make the subject more accessible, but in some spots, the arguments are particularly sloppy. For example, I can recall two derivations that use the argument "dxdy is doubly small, so we can ignore it."

3.) Some of the (one star) exercises simply ask you to rederive a result that was already shown to you in the chapter (or make some trivial alteration). But most of the two and three star exercises are pretty good.

All things considered, if this is your first stab at theoretical mechanics, I would go with this book. It will you give you the necessary intuition, and afterwards you'll probably be ready for Goldstein or even Arnold.

I have found this book to be the most informative, pedagogical treatise of any subject that I have ever seen from a textbook. Taylor treats the subject of classical mechanics the way a clock designer would show the inner workings of well designed time piece. The first five chapters give a solid overview of classical Newtonian mechanics, Taylor expounds details that were lost in under division physics. Chapter 6 offers a great introduction to the calculus of variations without skimping on details and explanations that draw parallels to differential calculus. After chapter 6, Taylor the book starts to show signs of interweaving knowledge. He resolves problems in both the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian chapters that were seen in the first five chapters in order to indicate the benefits of each of the methods over each other in certain cases (this really helped with my working knowledge of the subject when applied to arbitrary problems; usually in CM books, you just choose the method that the chapter taught, which does not help when it comes to problems in the real world; Taylor helps consolidate all of this knowledge and help the reader apply it properly).
Some people might say that Taylor can be verbose, however, I have never read a passage in this book from which I did not take away details about the subject that I would have missed. His explanations are thorough, engaging, and often fill gaps in the knowledge of the subject. In that respect, this book was fantastic for the semester I did independent study and often did not have a professor to fill in these gaps.

"Many of my students thought that Taylor's Classical Mechanics was the clearest textbook that they had ever used." -- Joel Fajans, University of California, Berkeley

I could not agree more.

I was always taught that text books are designed to act as references that you can not just simply read them straight through. After reading Taylor I have learned that that is just a cop out for bad authors.

John Taylor has a gift for writing textbooks! I spent an entire semester consistently returning to it so I may review derivations, consult practice problems, and read ahead with clarity before the next lecture. Every step is well thought-out and the derivations are set up with proper background information on why I should be interested. The results are explained, the problem sets have half of the solutions in the back, and every topic felt equally as informative. THIS is a proper textbook!

This book does a great job of covering classical mechanics in a manner that is approachable by students but that also has the level of rigor required in a higher level course. I suspect most students can breeze through the first five chapters in a week or two and then move on to the meat of the subject. However, I wouldn't skip the beginning chapters completely. There's some good stuff in there, like the discussion of the damped driven harmonic oscillator, which many students may not have ever analyzed, and the concept of center of mass coordinates.

My son had to learn Classical Mechanics from that book. Many Physicists complains that kids do not know classical mechanics anymore. If they learn from that book this is not surprising. First the plan of the book is awful. You do not learn Mechanics with Lagrange or Hamilton equation, but with the Angular Momentum theorem, clearly stated, proved and applied in different situation. Second you have to do some Kinematics before you do Dynamics. Third the author never clearly explain what is the structure of the vector field of the speed for each point of a solid, also terrible notation where the dot means God knows what (Moving Frame, Inertial Frame,...). I also like "torsors", It does not not seem this notion has passed the Atlantic. these are the objects at play if you deal with solids. I never saw anything about the power of the contact forces dissipated between two solids. These fundamental results explains why you can compute this power in any frames. The list goes on and on and in short, this book should be entirely rewritten. If you had read the 100 page book Volume 1 of Landau and Lipschitz, you will cry. The list of defects goes on and on. This book however is OK when you know the subject.

Like many physics majors, I have become used to dealing with undergraduate physics texts that are mediocre at best. The explanations are usually confusing, either because they are too dry or too verbose. If examples/derivations are included they are rarely practical and one tends to wonder at the author's reasoning for choosing those. I often find myself only using the textbooks to work the homework problems, and base almost all my knowledge on class notes.

This text is a welcome deviation from the standard: I have found it extremely easy to understand and follow. There are numerous examples and derivations, and I have referred to them more than once to gain familiarity with the topic. The book became my friend and ally; a priceless resource for the class. My course has only gone through chapter 13, but all the chapters that we covered were written well.

I looked at 5 undergrad level mechanics books for adoption (including Marion) and settled on Taylor as a very weak compromise. I do not like any of those books. Taylor is exceedingly weak on the observational and experimental basis of mechanics (Galileo, Kepler, Descartes). The text by Knudsen and Hjorth gets that part right and is recommendable. Here are other things that I do not like at all about the first 2 chapters in Taylor because they’re superficial and include too many misconceptions. In ch. 1:

Archimedes is the father of static physics but Taylor only refers to ‘seriously flawed’ Greek ideas. He mentions Galileo and Newton but ignores Kepler and Descartes (Newton’s 3rd law plus creating analytic geometry).

Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations are not equivalent to Newton’s 2nd Law, the latter is far more general. (i) Lagrange and Hamilton are restricted to conservative forces, (ii) there are Hamiltonian systems that admit no Newtonian or Lagrangian particle description (2D vortices and generators of canonical transformations in Hamiltionian mechanics).

He mentions ‘relativistic’ without stating that Newtonian mechanics is the limit of general relativity (GR) where light speed goes to infinity with G held constant. In that limit gravity is not a force but is an acceleration term on the left hand side of the acceleration equation.

Taylor refers to classical mechanics as ‘fashionable’ because of chaos theory. Chaos theory (where I worked) is pretty well dead right now but hydrodynamics has many interesting unsolved problems.

He fails to point out that objects with n components in n-dimensional space are not vectors unless they transform like vectors: in particular, a vector cannot be made to vanish by a coordinate transformation. This means that gravity is not a force vector, setting the stage for my comment above. Instead, Taylor rambles on about ‘philosophers of science’ on pg. 11.

There is a simple working definition of a local inertial frame but I don’t find it in ch. 1. Instead, he rambles further about philosophers of science.

Etc.

Below, I wrote exponents but they didn't appear so: 104 means 10^4, U2 means U^2, and so on.

In ch. 2 Taylor unnecessarily makes mistakes in hydrodynamics. First, contradicting what he claims, you cannot think of skin friction plus form drag as the first 2 terms in a Taylor expansion of the drag force.
For one thing, no object other than a sphere has a Stokes limit at small Reynolds nr. R where the drag is linear in the speed U. A cylinder and any other object has a nonlinear limit in U as R goes to zero. The form of the drag force follows from dimensional analysis as D=cρL2U2/2 where c is the dimensionless drag coefficient, r is the fluid density, and L is the extent of the body in the flow field of speed U. Taylor takes seriously the assumption that D=CU2 with C=constant. The only place that that holds is over a small range in R in the ‘drag crisis’. There, for a sphere, the drag coefficient is c≈.6 for R≈104 to 105, otherwise the drag coefficient is nonanalytic in R and therefore in speed U.

Local inertial frames should be defined and explained. Local inertial frames, in GR, replace Newton’s notion of ‘absolute space’. Accelerations relative to local inertial frames have real physical effects (Newton’s bucket expt., e.g., or Einstein’s elevator) and no new forces are introduced by the mere act of changing coordinates!

In later chapters while discussing noninertial frames both Taylor and K & H make the mistake of moving the terms representing acceleration of a frame relative to local inertial frames. Again, Newton’s Law in the form F=dp/dt holds only in inertial frames. Forces are vectors while velocities and accelerations are not vectors, so forces cannot be created by transforming coordinates. This is the correct viewpoint. Again, accelerations relative to local inertial frames have real, physical effects.

I would hope that someone would write a short, correct introduction to classical mechanics without introducing mistakes in an attempt to say too much while knowing and understanding too little.

This is the clearest book on classical mechanics I have read. You have to understand the subject very well to be able to explain something very clearly. This is a testament to John R Taylor's understanding of the subject. To be honest if you come across unclear teachers or authors chances are they do not understand the subject as well as they should.

The five "reviews" before mine are all from undergraduate physics majors at Amherst College. All five students were in the same class, which used a pre-publication edition of Taylor's book. I think their reviews reflect these facts, and say more about the students than they do about the book.

That being said, I also used pre-publication editions, but as a professor teaching the class. Before this book I had used the other "standards" (Marion and Thorton, etc). Taylor's book is by far the best of all of them. In fact I enjoyed it so much that I gave the author a lot of feedback about the material covered in the chapters and the problems. I wouldn't have spent all that time on the book if I didn't believe it was one of the best physics books I've ever read.

I use the book in the Jr-Sr mechanics course at Bates College. Since our students have already had a semester of classical mechanics from the book by Kleppner and Kolenkow, I begin with Chapter Six in Taylor's book (Calculus of Variations). The presentation is meticulous, the concepts are explained clearly and correctly (not always the case in other books), and the examples are carefully chosen. The problems are carefully chosen and carefully worded. Sometimes they present new material, e.g., the Thomas Precession, the rapidity, etc., using examples that clearly illustrate the essential points.

I also have taught the first six chapters and they are very refreshing and well-written. They are at just the right level for a student coming out of a calculus-based introductory physics course and, in addition, give a wonderful discussion of air resistance and viscious forces as they apply to automobiles, oil drops in the Millikan experiment, and many other practical situations. The examples are quite interesting and informative, and it was refreshing to read Taylor's original treatment of this important yet often short-changed subject.

Although this is a "first" edition, it comes after several pre-publication editions, all of which were class tested. Consequently, material that students found hard to understand was rewritten, hints were added to some of the problems, and essentially all the typographical errors were discovered and corrected. So the book has none of the drawbacks usually associated with first editions.

I especially enjoyed the optional chapter on Chaos. It is one of the best presentations of this potentially confusing subject I have ever read.

I have assigned chapters for independent study to undergraduate senior thesis majors. All of them have commented on how helpful the book was to them and how easy it was to understand on their own.

In a post-use review in the American Journal of Physics (April 2004, Vol. 72, Issue 4, p. 559), Professor Gayle Cook said "I find this a superb text. The clarity and readability of the book is so much better than anything else on the market that I confidently predict it will soon be the most widely used book on the subject." The rest of her review is very informative and well worth reading.

Finally, to get an idea of the the clarity and excellence of John Taylor's work, be sure to look at the reviews on the store.com of his book "An Introduction to Error Analysis."

This book is a decent textbook for studying classical mechanics. Although I agree with the other reviewers that Taylor is verbose, he makes up for this with his clear and easy to read writing style. As a result, I would say this book is ideal for self study and there are plenty of exercises with answers in the back of the book for one to check their work.

If one is looking at this text for a self study book, I would say the prerequisite for this book is an introductory course in mechanics at the freshman level. In terms of mathematical preparation, I would say ideally you should be familiar with calculus up through vector analysis and the basics of differential equations. Although Taylor attempts to develop both vector analysis and differential equations in the text and you could probably get by without them, I think knowing these subjects before hand will help you to focus on the physics better.

The reason why I don't give this product 5 stars is that I think the level of this book could be a bit more sophisticated since it is primarily intended for a junior level mechanics courses. For example, there isn't too much in the first five chapters that a third year physics major hasn't encountered before. Therefore, I would say that these chapters should only be given a quick once through just to review the material before proceeding to the more interesting later chapters.

Despite this fact, I still think that Taylor's text is a good book and would recommend it for anyone wanting to study classical mechanics at the undergraduate level. It will give you a solid understanding of the material and a good foundation for further study.

"Classical mechanics" is a brilliant book, certainly one of the very best at this level. The author doesn't save space when a thorough introduction to a topic or problem is needed. Very often an intuitive explanation is given first, followed by a formal exposition, and then comes the real gem - a qualitative discussion of the mathematical results which brings physics again in the picture with full force. The chapters on oscillations are outstanding, same as the exposition of generalized coordinates and generalized forces. Of course, not every detail in derivations has to be given, and it is the choice of what to include and what to skip that makes the flow of exposition logical and coherent. This book is a joy to read, it is excellent for self-study.

An excellent physics text with mathematical rigor. Comprehensive but still insightful. It starts from the discussion of Newtonian mechanics, teaches Lagrangian re-formulation and goes deeper to the Hamiltonian mechanics. This is a lucid text which can be taught (first five chapters) even in freshman level. If it is the question of making foundation, this book is peerless.

I love this book. This book covers basic mechanics including Newtonian, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian formalisms. This book spends a good amount of time deriving very important results and proves pretty much all of its conjectures. Taylor writes in a way that is easy, and occasionally comical, to read. There is also a very interesting chapter on chaos and nonlinear dynamics which is very interesting. One of my favorite things about this book is how rotational dynamics is covered and explained very thoroughly. It serves as a great reference as well. The level of this book is appropriate for sophomore up to senior level classical mechanics courses, depending how much you want to get out of it. When I took a course with this book, we went through the entire book, which was intense but well worth it.

I used this book for a semester long junior level classical mechanics course. It was a very good introduction to Lagrangian mechanics. The early chapters had me revisiting my freshmen physics book just to re-familiarize myself with concepts since it had been over a year since I had taken any physics courses. However, after doing that I found this book to be easily approachable. Some of the problems can be pretty challenging and may often involve clever mathematics tricks which made me question why Taylor was making me jump through all these hoops when the primary emphasis should be on physics and not mathematics.

In all my 7 years so far studying university-level physics (undergrad & grad), this textbook has easily been the best textbook I have ever used (for any subject, even counting non-physics courses). And this is true despite my personal aversion to classical mechanics. The textbook is simply amazing - the writing is so clear and understandable.

Very well written, and full of instructive problem sets.

Problems like "Use X to Prove A. Then use A along with B to show that C does D during E" teach students far, far more than problems like "Calculate what C does." The latter question teaches nothing: if you don't know how to do it, you're stuck, and if you do know how to do it, then what will you learn by writing it out? (Very little.)

This textbook is comprehensive, clearly written, well-paced, and thoughtful. Taylor clearly is an experienced professor and understands well how to convey material to students. Whether this text is required for your intermediate/advanced undergraduate classical mechanics course or you are someone who wishes to brush up on mechanics, this is the book.

Though I can't compare too much with other mechanics books, as a current undergrad I think Taylor's book is excellent compared to other physics texts I've had. The text is very clear and readble, with several examples and enjoyable problems.

I used Taylor's book when I taught "junior" mechanics. For context, our first-year mechanics course uses very little calculus, so our students really need to review the material from a more mathematically sophisticated level before proceeding to Lagrangian & Hamiltonian dynamics.

My problem with Taylor is that I was expecting something at least as rigorous as Kleppner & Kolenkow (an "honors" first year book) for the first half the book... it boggles my mind that Taylor's first 5 chapters reviewing mechanics is at a LOWER, less-sophisticated level than K&K. Taylor is very verbose, but at times he uses a lot of words to say very little. Many of the problems at the end of the chapters were pedantic (block on an incline plane?!) for a book aimed at juniors. There were almost no kinematics problems involving polar coordinates (in sharp contrast to K&K); no problems involving tension that varies down the length of a rope; no problems involving mass transfer OTHER than the rocket problem. The energy chapter is long, meandering mess.

That said, I did like the chapter on oscillations. Though again, lots of mediocre problems at the end of the chapter... I was expecting more interesting, "meaty" problems. The chapters on Lagrangian & Hamiltonian dynamics were fine, as far as they covered. I would have liked to see more on Noether's theorem and symmetry in general. The central force chapter was a stand-out in my opinion: pedagogically, I really enjoyed the Lagrangian approach.

The only real way this book surpasses all its competitors is price, being half, and in some cases, only a third of the cost. I know students REALLY appreciate that.

After teaching from this book, I kept wishing K&K had chapters on Lagrangian & Hamiltonian analysis.

This is undoutedly the best book I have ever read on Classical Mechanics. It is quite clear and the part of Special Relativity is brilliant.
However, there are some cons: it is quite long, and it could be condensed in much less pages. It is not even complete. For example, the part of waves is a little poor. If you want to master waves, I would recommend French or Berkeley. Also, If you are looking for more advanced books, I recommend Hamilton.
I would gave this book 4.5 stars.

This book is exceptionally well written as compared to the other popular mechanics books at about this same level (Kleppner, Morin). However, the book is unrigorous in both its use of mathematics (after all, it's a physics book!) and its treatment of physics, especially angular rotation and the variational dynamics. That makes it a good follow up to something like Halliday for students who are content to use math and do physics heuristically; that is to say, for most engineering and science students, this book makes for a good, gentle introduction to advanced topics in dynamics.

However, this book is not suitable as a either and introductory or intermediate text in mechanics for students interested in graduate studies which will depend on this material. Kleppner rigorously derives the classical physics theorems in limited cases, using rigorous but elementary calculus, making it a more suitable introduction to the subject. Morin unrigorously derives the classical physics theorems in generality using unrigorous vector calculus, making it a more suitable follow up to Kleppner and prerequisite to Goldstein (which is the standard doctoral text).

Notice, though, that Taylor covers significantly more topics than Kleppner and Morin combined. This is in the nature of things: heuristic examples are easier to explain than theorems and proofs, which affords Taylor the time to introduce some amazing applications of the theory, for example nonlinear dynamics and fluid dynamics. If your are looking for a cohesive introduction to these advanced topics, and are content to do things heuristically, there might not be a better book than Taylor.

I scored the book 2/5 because the frontmatter (preface; table of contents; etc.) in now way indicates that the treatment of angular velocity is heuristic. The posturing of the frontmatter, and of many of the reviewers, that imply that this book is somehow more "advanced" or "clear" than texts like Morin are just ridiculous. Being well written, and introducing interesting but esoteric applications, does not make a book advanced or clear. Treating central topics like angular velocity fully, even though it takes the discussion afield, is indeed a hallmark of a great advanced mechanics book.