Schaum's Outline of Lagrangian Dynamics

The content is very useful. The problem is the quality of the print edition. Some figures are completely incomprehensible, appearing like a black spot.

Claim to be easy, but still too 'physicist' point of view. Way too difficult to understand.

Generally Schaum's books are useful because they are books of problem sets with only very thin explanations to show how to solve the problems. That's what I pick them up looking for. This book is not that. The "fully solved problems" are not fully solved problems. The author does not write them in the form of asking a question and then showing how it is solved. This author just says starts saying something like "consider a particle in this situation" and then begins to manipulate it in some way where you don't even see what the attempt to solve for is until you've read all the derivations. Even worse, most of the supplementary questions at the end don't have answers. I don't know why but only chapter 2 has problems which are answered, and that is just a review chapter. Also, way too many of the problems are "show this" or "write a proof." There is almost no opportunity for arithmetic practice.

As a graduate student in physics, I have collected many Schuam's Outlines over the years and usually find them very helpful. This one was not up to par. The derivations and example problems were very wordy and skipped over half the mathematical details - one problem I did from the book required eleven steps when I was finished and the book showed three. Some chapters had only a few worked example problems and dozens that are given simply "as an exercise to the reader."

This book is great. It is not required for any course (at my school), but I got it to see about all the fuss I'd heard from all the grad students on here!It is a very accesible book. I haven't completed my (undergrad) mechanics course yet and it is just gravy!!! I would recommend this to any serious physics student, especially to get a leg up on the material. It is incredibly clear.

I intended to learn Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics for the purpose of using these methods further in Quantum Physics, Relativity and Quantum Field Theory. However, this book is focused too much on mechanical systems (all sort of complicated setups), and this somewhat clutters the understanding of the essentials. One other issue is that the book does not include answers to all problems... All in all, for me, it is not quite suitable.That being said, the author does try to explain the theory as good as he can, and there is a value added in reading this book, if you can get over the many technical systems described or are passionate about such analysis.

Great reference for all maths and physics students.

Many of the figures are too dark and not readable caused bythe very poor print quality.

For all those students who failed to understand the subject and have given up! Now they can try once more with this superb volume and I am sure Analytical Dynamics will no more be a nightmare. It devotes two chapters on background materials that everybody is expected to know before starting to study Analytical Mechanics. Then it went on devoting six chapters to explain and solidify the Lagrangian Formulation. It takes each issue separately and presents a larger number of solved and unsolved examples. In later parts other topics like small oscillations, d'alembert's and Hamilton's and Euler's treatments are carefully examined with well selected sets of problems. In Schaum's Outlines Series it is much more detailed book though slim one. After reading this student must solve more advanced problems from A S Ramsey's Dynamics II and Problems from Kleppner and Kolenkove's Book. After this one must read Herbert Goldstein's "Classical Mechanics". This time it will be enjoying journey!

Tras la lectura de este libro se tiene una visión muy clara de la forma de obtener las ecuaciones del movimiento con o sin ligaduras, tanto en sistemas inerciales, como en aquellos sistemas en movimiento no uniforme y girando de cualquier manera, tanto en campos conservativos como no conservativos. También se indica como se pueden obtener las fuerzas de ligadura. A cualquier estudiante del Grado de Física le puede venir bien como complemento en un verano, por ejemplo.