If someone is going to be taking at least two physics classes that involve the volumes of this book, I would strongly recommend to buy this copy of all the volumes. It's about 3 TIMES CHEAPER and you won't have to worry about getting the second or third or fourth volume just for two classes.

This is quite possibly among the worst physics textbooks ever written. It's bloated, hiding neccesarry information, complicated (the typical homework problem can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours... and apparently the average instructor will assign 10 problems, which can be multiple days of work.) Need formulas are hidden in lots of useless text that doesn't get to the point, and the 'summeries' at the back of each chapter leave a lot of the important equations out. Further, the book feels more like a Calculus book than a physics book. I was taking a Calc course at the same time as this physics course, and there was more math work in the Physics course. I love science, being a scientist was one of my dreams as a child, this book did a good job of putting a sour taste in my mouth. If you want your students to turn to religion instead of science, THEN this book might be a good choice.

Further, did I mention how bloated this book is? This 1300 page book could probably be cut down to about 30 pages without losing any meaningful content.

Further, the "Mastering Physics" associated teaching program is horrible. It claims it's a 'socratic teaching method', but in reality it's just questions from each chapter & having to submit answers online, it does nothing to ease the learning process, and usually just makes it more convoluted and frustrating. For example, it understands some constants, but not all of them... not even all the one's listed in it's own book. This means that if you're submitting an answer with constants as part, it's Russian Rolluete whether your answer will be accepted. Also, identical problems from the book and the website have had different answers on multiple occasions. The website is often wrong, and when it's right, half the time the book is wrong.

If you're a professor considering using this book to teach your students, the answer is no. Don't touch it. It's a horrible, horrible waste of paper. The physics portions of Wikipedia have a better track record than this piece of trash.

This is a very well written book. I have been using this book for a semester now and feel that it is an excellent book to learn from. It has a logical order, a very well organized problem set for each chapter organized by chapter section and tagged with difficulty levels (so that you can do a few easy problems then concentrate on the hard to save time). The graphs are informative and meaningful. Unhelpful pictures common in other textbooks (like a pictures of a car with a caption "A car has kinetic energy when it moves") are not numerous in this text book. The paperback textbooks come in a case with five volumes, helpful to the students to alleviate back pains as you can carry only the volumes you currently need.

Overall, excellent book. The only downside is that the Solutions Manuals are sold separately.

As an aside note, I often hear people griping about how bad books are and I have heard from many their negative views on this book. The common thing I find among all of those students is this: "How would they know? They never opened it."