Product Description

No other book on the market today can match the 30-year success of Halliday, Resnick and Walker's Fundamentals of Physics! In a breezy, easy-to-understand the book offers a solid understanding of fundamental physics concepts, and helps readers apply this conceptual understanding to quantitative problem solving. This book offers a unique combination of authoritative content and stimulating applications.

• Problem-solving tactics are provided to help the reader solve problems and avoid common errors.
• This new edition features several thousand end of chapter problems that were rewritten to streamline both the presentations and answers.
• Chapter Puzzlers open each chapter with an intriguing application or question that is explained or answered in the chapter.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26168 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1328 pages

Review
Instructor's Manual, Instructor's Supplement, Transparencies, Complete Solutions, Animated Illustrations for Mac and IBM, Image Manager, Study Guide and Learning Ware for Mac available. -- The publisher, John Wiley & Sons

From the Publisher
This popular book incorporates modern approaches to physics. It not only tells readers how physics works, it shows them. Applications have been enhanced to form a bridge between concepts and reasoning.

From the Back Cover
Create Your Own Teaching and Learning Environment using eGrade Plus with EduGen.

Finally, an interactive website based on activities you do every day!

Homework Management:

• An Assignment tool allows instructors to create student homework and quizzes, using dynamic versions of end-of-chapter problems from Fundamentals of Physics of their own dynamic questions. Instructors may also assign readings, activities, and other work for students to complete.
• A Gradebook automatically grades and records student assignments. This not only saves time, but also provides students with immediate feedback on their work. Each student can view his or her results from past assignments at any time.
• An Administration tool allows instructors to manage their class rosters on-line.

A Prepare and Present tool contains a variety of the Wiley-provided resources (Including all the book illustrations, Java applets, and digitized video) to help make preparation time more efficient. This content may easily be adapted, customized, and supplemented by instructors to meet the needs of each course.

Self-Assessment. A study and Practice area links directly to the multimedia version of Fundamentals of Physics , allowing students to review the text while they study and complete homework assignments. In addition to the complete on-line text, students can also access the Student Solutions Manual, the Student Study Guide, interactive simulations, and the Interaction LearningWare Program.

Interactive LearningWare. Interactive LearningWare leads the students step-by-step through solutions to 200 of the end-of-chapter problems from the text.

And there’s lost more! You’ll need to see it to believe it.
Check out the Hallida/Resnick/Walker site at: www.wiley.com/college/halliday

Customer Reviews

Excellent Text and Companion CD
I'm sure you can read a ton of reviews on here that will tell you the same thing. The examples are great, the text is straightforward and clear, and the exercises are adequately elaborated, so no problem really leaves you thinking "well, this just can't be right...". And in case you get stuck, you've got easily the best software companion available for any textbook ever. The CD-Physics companion can guide you through solutions for many of the exercises, either by presenting a nicely worked out solution as you would write it on a paper, by giving you hints, or by helping you solve the problem yourself with the interactive LearningWare feature. It becomes obvious that this book spends a lot of time making sure the reader can achieve an adequate understanding of the material, rather than forcing the student to memorize vague formulas which seem to have no unity. The chapters are presented in a (somewhat) reasonable order, building on concepts learned in the previous chapter in most cases. You get the full introductory college physics stuff in this book, from Newtonian mechanics to thermodynamics to electricity and electromagnetic waves. This is perfect for the student who shies from asking others for help, as either the book or the CD Physics companion will have the answers they seek. I was never particularly fond of physics and have always thought of it as the bare essentials for a computer engineer, but this book gave me a new appreciation for the physical aspects of my engineering field, especially with the very complete (from a general overview) chapters on electricity, capacitance, and inductance.

Knowledge Does Not Come Easy
It is unfortunate that there exist two groups of people who might read this textbook at some point: Those who enjoy physics and those who need only to pass a physics class (or three) in college. It is easy to appeal to the former, because this book is comprehensive and reads like a novel for the physics-minded. It covers all of the standard topics thoroughly and clearly without getting into overly-specialized topics, hence the title (notice the word 'fundamentals.')

However, sad as it may be, most people are not 'physics-minded.' Even more unfortunate is that almost all criticism will come from disgruntled college students who do not like the textbook because it does not give a fully-worked example for every type of problem ever considered or because they had a hard time in the class. There is a great deeper level of knowledge acquired in finding out for oneself the true nature of a physics concept. The contents of this book allow perfectly for such rewarding study, but let me be clear: YOU HAVE TO WORK FOR IT. An engineering-based physics textbook may give its readers all the material explicitly and easily, and maybe even completely outline how to solve all of the book's problems, but it really doesn't teach anything that pertains to physics as a pure and THEN applied science.

One final note: Some of the problems in this book are very challenging, and are designed to promote thinking beyond the level required from the content of the book's explanations. However, no one expects you to do the 100-or-so problems at the end of every chapter. The first few problems for every subsection are straightforward enough and sufficient to reinforce the concepts of that section. So don't be deterred by the nature of the problems! You could never look at a problem in this book and still get more than from other elementary physics textbooks.

Great text
I've used both Halliday and Giancoli, though the latter I used as a Freshman back in 2002 for first semester physics and the former I used as a post-bac student in 2006/07 when I completed the second semester.

I do have to strongly disagree with previous reviewers that the problems are of a difficulty beyond that of the chapters. I had an amazing teacher, but often I found that a problem wasn't exactly like one he went over in class--which is a good thing as the only way to learn physics meaningfully is to spend long hours working away and trying to figure out a problem until that "aha!" moment. There really is no better way to grasp the fundamentals--and this is extremely important depending on your major (such as engineering).

I also found the text to be lighthearted--something you rarely find in texts these days. There are many problems that made me quietly laugh while in the library, often involving penguins or a jumping armadillo (when I later TA'd physics, my students and I had a discussion on whether armadillo's can actually jump; none of us knew the answer...)

This text really helped me learn physics--I missed two lectures and I was able to still do the problems assigned and understand the material covered on my own, albeit at a much greater investment of time compared to how it would have been had I made it to the lectures. I will agree the text is difficult, but that is the way calculus-based physics should be.

Physics is only ever easy for two reasons--one, because you're following cookie-cutter formulas and the material simply isn't testing your knowledge well enough. Two--because you've labored over and over (or maybe not too long if you're an Einstein) and understand the material and can apply it to a situation you have never seen before, with ease. After you have that understanding, the simple beauty of the physical laws of nature will amaze you.

And then when you take quantum mechanics/physical chemistry you find out a lot of what you learned in introductory physics was basically crap and that the world is much more complicated, and equally more amazing. But the "crap" you learned is good enough for 99.9% of problems you will encounter in everyday life.