This book is a terrible, terrible waste of a textbook. The authors spend quite a bit of time talking about absolutely nothing in the book. They oftentimes show examples that are very trite and obvious for anyone to do, but then assign much harder problems. I was very annoyed that they never even bothered to do a complete Kirchoff's rules circuit problem. They emphasize absolutely NO conceptual understanding of the material. I can cite no redeeming qualities of the book except perhaps for decent diagrams.

This is written as a graduate physicist; I am no stranger to difficult physics problems. The problems jump from stupidly easy to difficult in a way that is hard for first years, and I sympathize with their difficulty with this book.

I am in a beginner physics class this semester and this book is the required text. So far it is like trying to read Greek. I am a relatively good student with the ability to figure out problems but no matter the wording used or the examples given, this book is just plain confusing. The problems at the end of the chapters are rediculously hard and don't seem to be covered in the least little bit within the chapter. The author's attempt at explaining the Pythagorean Theorem was even confusing, shouldn't that be one of the easier ideas? I think I'm in big trouble!!!!!

I am by no means incompetent, as I am an honors student and have no problem getting strait A's in calculus, linear algebra and object oriented programming, but this book is abysmal and almost impossible to follow. The book is horrible on so many levels. First off, many of the chapters start off throwing equations at you, and offer no clarity as to the purpose of the equation. The text very poorly explains concepts and the problems given throughout the book are even worse. The problems given during the chapters literally throw information out at you that was'nt ever touch upon in the entire chapter, and to make matters worse, i've counted 4 problems that have incorrect solutions, and thats only chapter 2! This is a very poorly written, even worse explained book. I dont mind sadistically difficult problems at the end of a chapter, if the book did a good job of teaching me the concepts and computations to answer the problem, unfortunately this book does neither. Whats funny is that our teacher started the semester by saying, he does'nt like the book, but were using it while he researches a better book for us to use. Sadly, I could have walked into a book store, and grabbed ANY physics book, and it would have been better then this one. Luckily I have several other physics books that peice together the missing information for me, but for a textbook that students depend on to learn the subject, it should'nt be required.

I am a chemistry teacher and I am taking a college physics course as a review for an exam. The text has problems worked out but they are difficult to follow, and the problems at the end of the chapter are entirely impossible. It seems one person wrote the text and a different person wrote the end of text questions and another wrote the solutions. I am using other texts to help but unfortunately my teacher requires me to solve problems from this text. May God bless everyone who has to use this text. Teachers, professors, please rethink using this text.

I am not at all impressed with the 7th ed. I am now using another textbook instead of the the College Physics 7th ed required for my class.
The text itself if so-so. The text explanations of concepts are unclear and unnecessarily wordy, not the worst out there but certainly nothing to scream about. One of the irritating tendencies was that simple explanations of even basic concepts were few and far between, and often hidden in the middle of muddy piles of minor trivia. But these are not my major gripes.
What I really dont like: The makings of the text are simply sloppy. Questions covering ideas not mentioned in the book, incorrect answers, or improperly-referenced answers abound. The pages are crammed with so much visual clutter it's hard to find important points. The solutions manual only covers 20% of the questions! Nearly every other textbook covers all odd-numbered, sometimes even ALL of them! Yet this one still costs just as much. You have to submit personal information just to access the "free" website, which doesnt have that much anyways.
For crying out loud, the guy wrote this edition had to come on here to give the ratings for the book a boost! And one other 5-star rater was almost certainly someone from the book's publisher or team. Read through the ratings, you will see which one I mean.

I've been teaching from this text (ed 7) for a year now. (We changed from the Cutnell text.) We use it in a two (2) semester (15 weeks each) course in "general physics." The text is much better than many of the reviewers suggest. It is a college level text - which means you should have some previous experience with physics (high school or fundamental ?) and you must have the math background - trigonometry and college algebra (through exponentials, logarithms and analytic geometry). The topics are presented and organized well, and the examples and problems complement the content. The conceptual questions are, for the most part, easy and very direct. While some problems are difficult, (most color coded blue and red), others play from the numerous, contemporary and historical examples. Photos and diagrams are well done with portraits of historical figures included. There are many biological applications and each chapter ends with a summary of equations, units and important concepts. The modern physics chapters are particularly interesting - relativity, atomic and nuclear physics. (If too much time is spent in the early chapters, you'll miss this in the last five.) No complaints about the text, like some mentioned here, were received from students on my reviews. (About half my students did ask frequent questions about solving problems in my discussion sessions, as expected, but about half required little or no help at all.)

I am a student who has now been using this book for a semester. The book covers a wide range of topics, moves very quickly, and is by no means simple! Most of the bad reviews are by people who are not able to understand the book because i) the concepts are really complex or ii) they are not supplemented by classroom help. By no means is this book great, but considering how terrible some other physics books are, the new edition of this book tackles complexities in a fairly readable manner.

This is honestly one of the most poorly written texts I have ever come across. I normally don't criticize textbooks because I'm quite a good learner, however this book really is just absolutely awful and completely useless. In fact, I've had to get 2 extra books to supplement this garbage just to clarify what the book says. It's really quite confusing, the explanations are far too short(or non-existant!) and the chapters just confuse you more than you already were. It provides about 2 small paragraphs of explanations, with one solved easy problem, then bombards you with 50 hard problems to do. I guess you're supposed to have spontaneously learned to solve them from somewhere else!

If I could give this book a zero or negative rating, I would.

This text book is a waste of time & money! In class we ONLY use it for the questions and they are sometimes incomplete. The class has also found several mistakes in the answer key. Even the answer key sucks! We don't really care about the answer it's how they got the answer that interests us.

It's confusing and long winded and terrible. It takes the fun out of physics. Oh wait there is no fun in physics. Damned MCATs!

This is the most poorly written text I have ever used. I bought the student solutions manual also which I thought might help me understand the concepts, but to no avail, the solutions manual jumps from Problem #5 to #21 in one chapter?? Forget about the examples on the text they are totally confusing and don't show you how they arrived with the solution. I am no dummy. This book will make you have low self esteem, thats the way I felt. I have a physics tutor who also said this book makes physics even harder to understand. I trully feel sorry for the student that has to buy this book because the school requires it. I had to buy a bootleg CD with the teacher's solutions on it to fully understand this text! We shouldn't have to do that.

I would assume it's hard to find a really good physics text out there in the first place, but since I had a bad professor as well, I figured I'd teach myself out of the book. BAD IDEA. It is impossible to complete any of the homework problems in a reasonable time, and the examples and solutions they do give are extremely hard to understand. And when I started using my professor's lecture again and the book together, that was even worse. Someone needs to come up with something that non-physics geniuses, pretty much the majority of the world, can CLEARLY understand.

I feel sorry for anybody who relies on this book to get a good handle on physics. I am an A student, but I am spending obscene amounts of time trying to comprehend the material. This book (and the accompanying solutions manual) do a lousy job of walking you through the steps to solve many of the problems. The one I am particularly frustrated with is Interactive Example 3.7 (page 66), which tells you at one point to solve for time by using the quadratic formula. They do not bother to show you how they got the answer! The appendix to which it refers you for this particular example, is seriously not helpful. I am spending upwards of 25 hours per WEEKEND studying for physics, and this text does NOTHING to elucidate any of the concepts. I cannot wait to give my input to the department at the end of the semester.

Do not purchase.
The company advertises that the price includes free website access. Once you purchase the book, the company responds by asking a list of personal questions when you attempt to access their site. The book includes an access code but no password. They refuse to give a passcode until you have answered personal questions.What if you dont want your personal info in someones database? Thats too bad. Apparently the web site / software isn't quite free once you have purchased the book. Boycott this book until they stop asking personal questions that are none of their business. Their excuse is that they need this info to list a student in their database. Do you really think college students should be bullied into giving up personal data? If sales falls off, perhaps they can figure out how to create a unique number in each book so that account numbers are unique. This would mean all a student would need to do would be to choose a unique password and sign on the web site.

Do Not Purchase

great quality, pretty quick shipping for a standard option, within less than 12 weeks, good packaging, very good seller

My name is Chris Vuille. When Jerry Faughn retired, I was selected to write the seventh edition of Serway and Faughn's College Physics (contributing author Chuck Bennett handled the website). I point out that the concerns expressed here are all directed at previous editions. In the new seventh edition, I thoroughly rewrote the text, going line by line, sometimes deleting entire pages and redoing them. I introduced numerous new example problems in a user-friendly side-by-side format. The layout people did a great job, and Ray Serway made numerous valuable contributions. You will find the seventh edition has been transformed. The market has responded by making College Physics seventh edition far and away the leading such text in America. I listened to you, as did Ray Serway, Jerry Faughn, and Thomson Publishing, and the result is the knowledge you need, the way you can understand it. I will work just as hard on the eighth edition. Physics is tough, and I'll do my best to help you. Thanks for your criticisms!

worst physics book i've ever encountered!!! not enough examples, and the problems are so tough you spend hours doin your hw. your professor probably won't even give you questions that hard on the exam! waste of brain power!! >(

I'm just finishing a pre-pharmacy program, so I've had general chemistry, organic, biology, microbiology, and calculus. I had no problems with any of the texts used for those courses. But this physics book is just terrible. The prose is so awkward, that I finally gave up trying to understand it, and bought a different book. If you are assigned this text, I hope you find a better text to use as a supplement so that your grade doesn't suffer.

My daughter is taking high school AP physics with this book. As a former teaching assistant in physics (grad school), this book is terrible in that the chapters give little insight to the information needed to work the problems. Without significant, and excellent, supplement by the teacher this book should not be used.

I am taking college physics as well as my second semester of general chemistry. This book in no way compares to my chemistry text. I am a very good college student with a BS in computer science and a strong physics background,... and even for me this book is extremely hard to follow. That is the consensus among my fellow students which include a friend who already has his MBA. There is not much explanation of concepts before you jump into the problems, and there are not nearly enough example problems worked in the text. Additionally, considering this is the 6th edition I am surprised to still find errors in the text.

Don't even consider purchasing the student solution manual. I think it works out about 15 of the end of chapter problems per chapter, which is not very many.

Where do I begin?
The chapter discussions are not clear nor are they laid out in a logical sequence.
The problems at the end of each chapter are complex with no hints or solutions guide to help you along. Some of the fomulas that are required appear to be plucked from thin air, because they are not to be found in the text.
The book has an attractive cover which blies the obscure and confusing contents.
I am a straight A student in the sciences. I consider myself competent when it comes to deciphering other peoples explinations and examples. Having said that, I would never, under any circumstances, recommend this book to a beginning Physics student.

I used this book for physics my sophomore year, and I have mixed feelings regarding the book. On one hand, the text does not clearly and concisely explain concepts, but on the other hand, the end-of-chapter summaries and the practice problems were great preparation for tests. I doubt you will find more difficult problems than those this author gives, and your teacher would have to be a sadist to test you with problems harder than these. As another reviewer stated, you must couple this book with the lessons of a teacher - it would be very difficult to attain a firm grasp of the concepts based on this book alone. But if you're looking for concise lists of equations and challenging applications, this book will serve you well.

I found that in my studies in college so far, that Serway and Faughn have the best examples and the most vivid descriptions to help one learn. It has helped me understand what I'm doing a little bit better.

This is one of the very best books out there for covering general, non-calculus, physics. It is generally used in connection with a General Physics class as the class text. As such it should add to and provide clarification of concepts presented in class (suggesting that students should attend class). This is accomplished very well. The problem sets are excellent and the explanations are accurate and concise. This book is the standard by which many of us judge other physics books.

This book totally failed to explain the concept of torque to me, I spent one hour reading the torque chapter twice and it failed to show me. Then I asked my friend online and he was able to explain it to me in less than a minute. This book is only good for the problem sets, which occasionally have a cameo from a Warner Brothers cartoon and one picture of Raymond Serway on a bed of nails. You will not be able to teach yourself physics concepts if you use this book, so if your professor assigns it, I recommend you go to class. Maybe that's why he or she assigned it in the first place.

My physics professor's infinite wisdom faltered when he decided to use this text for our college-level class. It lacks adequate explanations of commonplace physics concepts that are essential to the understanding of the subject. The fact that it doesn't even define new vocabulary words within the text (as well as the absence of a glossary) make it a virtually useless textbook. Its only strength is the variety of colorful illustrations that keep the reader mildly amused between the pages of its nonsensical text. If I had the gradebook, I'd give it a D-minus!

Although this is a relatively comprehensive text, better explanation of answers to problems in each chapter would make it much easier to understand. Is it possible to obtain this book in a Teachers' Edition? I have been looking for quite some time and am unable to find it. If anyone knows where to buy this edition, please contact me.

Does anyone know where I can find (or does anyone have, and wish to sell to me) the solution book for the third edition of this book? If so, please email me at delao@ureach.com Thank you.

Excellent Book... the book is easy to read and does and great job of explaining concepts and problem. I used it for my AP Physics B class because the book we were using was horrible. I got a five (out of five) on my exam.

I had the misfortune to teach out of this book for one semester when I was first hired at my present job. I soon decided I would rather have needles stuck in my eyeballs than use it for a second semester. The big problem is the lack of explanation of _concepts_. Many chapters begin with an equation, without explaining what it means or where it might have come from. Many of the other textbooks available share these flaws to some extent, but this is the worst of a bad lot.

I used this book for three quarters at my university. THe author does not do a good job presenting the material. It would help if he were a little more conceptual. If one can get a hold of the teachers solution manual and work out most of the problems, that would be sufficient to learn and get an A. But on reading the material alone, one will only become confused.

This book is almost impossible to read. It is filled with oblique, technical references that leave everyone, even me and the two other people in my Pre-AP class that make A's, completely bewildered. There is some connection between the material presented in the chapter and the problems in the back of the chapter, but not much. This book also goes on tangents into highly technical examples instead of actually teaching and explaining the topics presented. The only redeeming value of this book is the number of fairly helpful example problems that are provided.

As a student who is forced to use this book in my Ap Physics class in High School I find this book extremly hard to understand. I also think that this book assumes the reader knows more information that is not known by many readers including all the kids in my class.

The text oversimplified many topics. Many sample questions did not illustrate the chapter's fundamental concepts.