THis book came in perfect untouched condtion. Better than I expected. Quickly too.

After taking a year of General Physics with this testbook, I have really come to hate this book. Its not that I hate physics (I'm a physics nerd with multiple majors in Physics, Mathematics and Engineering), it is the fact that this book is so poorly written. The typical examples are less than illuminating in attempting to be conceptual without actually assigning values to the equation.

My professor had to continually use supplemental text and illustrations from other testbooks in order to explain what Serway & Jewett had made confusing. Randall D. Knight's "Physics: A Strategic Approach" has been recommended as a much better text.

Snark of my title aside, this book is really poor for trying to learn physics from, on your own, which with the quality of many teachers today you are most likely to end up doing. If you find a quality teacher willing to take the time to form his or her own explanations for everything in this book, in more understandable terms, then it is a good reference.

But if you are not that fortunate, I suggest you choose another book, even books that are 10-30 years old now only lack one or two things this book has. I've been looking into other explanations of the same material and they are a million times more comprehensible than how the same topics are presented in this book.

I think this book has been rearranged and rewritten, to suck a few more dollars out of college students, a few too many times and no longer has any sensible order to it - if it ever had any. Again, it comes down to this: I can see this book being useful only as a reference, to be used by a good teacher who can pick and choose chapters, sections, and problems to be read and discussed in a DIFFERENT order than they are presented in the book, and also to explain the concepts in English rather than muddled jargon. I was not impressed by the authors' thick Physics accent.

Finally, the single biggest personal complaint I have with the book is the EXTREME liberties taken with shrugging off analytical thinking in physical problems. It only encourages students to stop thinking and just memorize, which should be a punishable crime. The book lightly whisks by methods of analytical thinking in a brief free body diagrams discussion, which would probably have been left out by the authors if it was not so ubiquitous in physics textbooks that it would have been notable missed and criticized (rightfully so) without it. I have many fellow students who think they are excellent at physics, but they're really just impressed that they understood some of the things in this book - which should are actually extremely basic physics concepts. And if that wasn't sad enough, they completely lack the analytical skills that a physicist needs; both because their teacher (not the fault of this book, of course) AND this text DISCOURAGE asking questions.

I don't know of a better -single- physics textbook to choose from, since I can't exactly sample the lot (at the prices these things are going for they should come with a private tutor), but it is worth suggesting two sources for help in understanding physics: the Feynman lectures - these are extremely dated and somewhat hard to follow but very helpful in understanding how to deal with the "what ifs." The MIT OCW lectures by Professor Lewin are invaluable.