Customer Reviews
A solid book - By: , 08 Jan 1999 
This is probably the best treatment of Classical Mechanics I've ever read, though, as with anything, it could use some improvement. My only gripe is the usual one with texts like this: There are few if any specific physical instances of formulations that so often serve as a watershed of understandingin physics. For example,in the derivation of the Langrangian, & finally the Hamiltonian, no point for point physical example (say, with a central force like gravity) is offered. It would be nice to see a step by step description of how the Riemann sum over time of the differencein kinetic & potential energies changes as different paths are chosen. I did this & it was beautiful & incredibly enlightening. Once you can _see_ that kind of behavior, you're powerful! It is then easy to generalize to any abstract system. But all else was excellent. If you really want to learn Mechanics, you must start with Goldstein. Recommended preliminaries: Stewart's Calculus; Schaum's Linear Algebra; Halliday, Resnick & Walker's Fundamentals of Physics & Symon's Mechanics.
A good text, once the best. - By: , 24 Jul 1998 
Goldstein's "Classical Mechanics" appeared at the right time. The development of quantum mechanics demanded familiarity with methods of advanced mechanics that no student of physics had been introduced to. Dirac toldin a semminar that he didn't know what a Poisson bracket was, when he was constructing his version ot quantum mechanics (where Poisson brackets play a fundamental role). Heisenberg didn't know matrices,in similar circumstances. Max Born did know these things, & actually wrote a superb book on mechanics using them, but it wasin German, at an advanced level & called Mechanics of the Atom. The book then availablein English was the formidable Whittaker "Analytical Dynamics", whose exercises took sometimes a whole page just to be stated! In this panorama,in the fifties, Addison-Wesley published the beautifully produced Goldstein. It was an instant sensation. In the introduction the author candidly confessed that,in his opinion, a cou! rsein mechanics justified itself only as a preparation for quantum mechanics, & that was clearly the slant of the book. It was extremely well written, except for a disastrous chapter on the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. The exercises were not at the level of the text: you found much better onesin Slater, Frank's "Mechanics", for instance. The references were excellent, commented, & gave the reader a sense of perspective (and of awe,in the company of men like Riemann, Born, Weber...). I loved the book & hated the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. Later on the slim book by Landau, Lifshitz, "Mechanics", entered the scene & showed that Goldstein's program could be made better, briefer, & that the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, clearly & sensibly derived, was the jewel of the crown. Not only,in the subsequent volumes of their Theoretical Physics course, they showed how invaluable this Hamilton-Jacobi was, by applying it with great skillin all kinds of problems.! Then, finally, it became clear that mechanics was not dead! : the whole affair of stability, chaos, etc, exploded, & it became impossible to consider mechanics just as a ladder to quantum mechanics. So, even the philosophy of the venerable Goldstein had to be forgotten. Still, Goldstein's Classical Mechanics is alive, possibly now more Classical than Mechanics.
Good book if a little dated - By: , 05 Apr 1998 There are more books on classical mechanics than there are students of the subject. Goldsteins book is one that just seems to of been around forever.Even though this was writtenin 1980 he has deliberatley avoided the 'modern' developments such as Abraham & Marsden & the towering genius of 20th century mechanics Arnold. This is no place for diffeomorphisms or invariant tori. Perhaps these days the best use for a book like Goldstein is to have it along side A&M to translate from the old language to the new & vice versa. At the end of each chapter there is a guide to other texts on the same or related topics. Very well written & very amusing.
A book that puts the subject in a proper context . - By: , 19 May 1997 
A serious text book for serious Physics students.
The flow of the book is excellent & the choice
of topics/examples is just what it should be .
Problems are tough but very rewarding if you solve
them . The mathematical methods introduced are
done with a view to be able to relate to
theory of quantum mechanics .
go for it !
