McCoy's book is phenomenal if you seek the essentially pure theory and mathematical characterization of "real," differential equation-based ballistics. The book starts with the simplest form of ballistics calculations, the basic parabolic gravity-only point-mass trajectory everyone encounters in a basic physics course, and then slowly works up from there, all the way to the full six-degrees-of-freedom model (three positional dimensions of motion plus the three rotational dimensions of the spinning, wobbling projectile,) accounting for gravity, frontal air resistance, crosswinds, lifting forces, forces due to the projectile shape, Coriolis force (the consequence of Earth's rotation,) and even rocket forces if the "projectile" is actually a self-powered one. McCoy goes into the simplifications one can make to compute with only a point-mass projectile model (no rotational motion) and I most liked this approach for my own uses. He divides the work into chapters, with each new one adding a level of generality to the model(s) involved. This organization makes it very easy for the reader to choose the level of complexity and accuracy most desired. I was very impressed with McCoy's development of envelope curves, those being the curves of absolute flight limits of a projectile, giving the total interior region that a fired projectile could possibly hit.

This book provides an immense background of everything needed to develop your own ballistics programs and could even provide enough material to do some original research in the field, but I would definitely contend that this book isn't for everyone. In particular, you need to have a very strong mathematics background, including linear algebra and differential equations, and one would do best with some numerical analysis background as well. McCoy does give some detail about various numerical methods one could use to advantage when doing the calculations with a computer, but not quite enough to actually get you started if you weren't already significantly familiar with standard single-step Runge-Kutta and multi-step differential equation solvers. Further, this book does contain a lot of typos and small errors buried deep in the equations, so you need to be able to follow the development well enough to catch them. Essentially, you need to be able to understand the methods used in higher math quite well, use McCoy's initial modeling, and then re-derive his equations on your own, with his derivations as guidance. Also, I think the typesetting of equations is done poorly in general, so it is often somewhat difficult to read them and keep his notations straight.

This book is well worth its price, and the knowledge contained in it is probably nearly unavailable anywhere else these days. Ballistics is an old, but very technical and complicated field, and few people study it extensively any more, so I think it has become somewhat extinct in academic circles. This is unfortunate, for it is magnificent and rewarding, and McCoy's book is an opus dedicated to preserving this wonderful field of hard-won knowledge. The study of precise ballistics modeling and trajectory prediction was the first "big" problem that spawned the development of the digital computer, and the first true calculus problem ever solved by any mathematician was the shape-of-minimum-resistance ballistics problem, solved by Sir Issac Newton. McCoy's book is a grand survey of mid-20th century ballistics knowledge, complete with graphs, photographs, high-speed shadowgraphs from the ranges at Aberdeen Proving Ground, and references to the original authors and studies done by the military and other technical institutions.

You will not regret the purchase of this book, especially if you want to understand the real theory and know how to calculate real ballistics trajectories for all kinds of projectiles at various speeds, not just watered-down, oversimplified, inaccurate, textbook-friendly versions of them. I'm even considering buying myself a second copy, just to be sure I will always have a mint-condition copy available!