Analytical Mechanics 1st Edition by Louis N. Hand (PDF)

Description

Analytical Mechanics, first published in 1999, provides a detailed introduction to the key analytical techniques of classical mechanics, one of the cornerstones of physics. It deals with all the important subjects encountered in an undergraduate course and prepares the reader thoroughly for further study at graduate level. The authors set out the fundamentals of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics early on in the book and go on to cover such topics as linear oscillators, planetary orbits, rigid-body motion, small vibrations, nonlinear dynamics, chaos, and special relativity. A special feature is the inclusion of many ‘e-mail questions’, which are intended to facilitate dialogue between the student and instructor. Many worked examples are given, and there are 250 homework exercises to help students gain confidence and proficiency in problem-solving. It is an ideal textbook for undergraduate courses in classical mechanics, and provides a sound foundation for graduate study.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐As the authors point out in their preface, this book was developed as part of a classroom course – one where students would have ongoing email discussions with one another and with a teaching assistant throughout the course. As a result, many important ideas are presented in the form of “email questions”, which the book leaves unanswered. Students are supposed to think about them on their own, then verify their answers by emailing the TA. Similarly, none of the chapter exercises have any answers, nor is there a student answer guide available.While this is an interesting pedagogical approach, it severely limits the value of this book as a general physics text. In fact, outside the exact instructor-based class format used by the authors, the book is relatively useless.As alternatives, I’d recommend Fowles & Cassiday (at the easy end of the spectrum), or for the more ambitious, just jump into Goldstein. Either of those volumes, plus a good problem book, will teach you far more physics than Hand & Free.

⭐i think it’s about i was searching for and too necessary, so as important, thanks for you inside view. gerard

⭐This book was horrible. I’m so sorry if your professor assigns this book. I had to use it for Classical Mechanics 2 and it was awful. Almost no examples, no solutions manual and the author skips important explanations.

⭐When I get this book, I find it is exactly what I want. Every page is fine and it is worth the money.

⭐awesome book

⭐There are numerous books in Classical Mechanics. However, there appears to be no other book written for undergrads besides this one which contains an almost complete list of topics. For this reason, the present book remains the unchallenged text for an undergrad Classical Mechanics course for those instructors who do not wish to deviate from the established must-be-taught curriculum.Unfortunately, this creates some displeasure among students since the book is plagued by many problems. The typesetting and the graphics are good but everything else is not that good. Not much planning was done and not much effort was placed to convert the initial lecture notes and emails into a coherent and pedagogical manuscript. And the flaws, in my opinion, are not the lack of answers for the problems at the back of the book, nor that the book is really too advanced, nor that the book is too mathematical as has been argued by other reviewers.Instead I take issue with: (1) The writing style is poor. (2) The solved problems and examples are not well presented and their number is not enough to cover all concepts discussed in the book. There is a good fraction of unsolved problems however. (3) The ordering of the material. For example: Chapter 3 on Oscillators could be Chapter 1. Almost no Lagrangian formalism is used. Another example is Sections 5.1 and 5.2. They use only the concept of the Lagrangian. They do not fit in Chapter 5 which is about the Hamiltonian formulation of Mechanics. (4) Not only the material could have been ordered better but, more importantly, the presentation of the topics is fragmented. For example: In Section 1.4 to concept of a constraint is given. There is some discussion on the classification/distinction of constraints but the discussion is stopped and the most important distinction – holonomic vs. nonholonomic – is discussed in Appendix A of Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, instead of presenting the theory of variations and then explain how it is applied to physical problems, the authors open sections with titles such as `2.7 Solving Problems with Explicit Holonomic Constraints’ and `2.8 Nonintegrable Nonholonomic Constraints – a method that works’. As a result, great confusion emerges between the mathematical techniques and the concept of constraints. I would have preferred that the same problems (some with and some without constraints) are first solved in Chapter 1 using virtual work and then in Chapter 2 using calculus of variations. (5) There are many important issues that are left as exercises and are not discussed in the text. For example: what is the relation between the energy and the Hamiltonian? (6) There is no section on classical scattering and cross sections. This is very surprising given that one of the authors is an accelerator physicist. The students learn about the topic in a single problem: Problem 28 of Chapter 4. (This explains why I claimed that the list of topics is almost complete and not complete.)There are several other issues that bother me but hopefully the above list is enough. There is certainly a need for another book on Classical Mechanics that will contain the topics that this book contains but written with care, attention to detail and clarity. Until then, this book will be used by many instructors and you will have to buy it if you are an undergraduate student studying the subject. If you really want to avoid it, try Landau and Lifshitz’s

⭐which is an excellent book but it is requiring a higher level of mathematical skill and is missing topics that were developed after the authors’ deaths (e.g. chaos) or found in other volumes of the series (e.g. relativity).

⭐This is a very good book for learning analytical mechanics.As a student, I recieve the Mechanics by Florian Scheck, and I want to tell you that I couldn’t understand a word. Mechanics by Florian Scheck is probably a good book but for me, it’s not readable. So, I took Analytical Mechanics by Louis N. Hand and Janet Finch, a readable book, that actually tries to explain things in simple, clear words. It’s also better than Landau’s.I’ve also enjoyed read from it other chapters that wasn’t in my course’s scope, something I never thought I’ll do… Recommended!

⭐Analytical Mechanics by Hand and Finch is more like Analytical S*#! Sandwich by two awful textbook writers. I didn’t mind the fact that there were so few examples throughout the text, or the lack of answers to problems in the back. I think that actually encourages creative thinking and builds problem solving skills, provided the rest of the book is written clearly enough to help students build a strong concept base. This book however, is not clearly written and ends up either frustrating the students or boring them to tears, or both… usually both.I would suggest picking up a book with a little bit of personality, and possibly using this one for the challenging problems, once you feel confident with the material.

⭐One of the mathematical challenges of understanding classical dynamics is to get your partial differentiation right, remembering and making explicit if needed what variables are being held constant, especially when deriving canonical transformations. I don’t think this book takes enough care in this direction. Eq.(6.7) has partial dLbar/dqdot = 0, with justification in the book that Lbar does not depend explicitly on qdot, depending explicitly on Q and Qdot. But you have to be careful in deciding what are the independent variables, and Q and Qdot can depend implicitly on qdot (depending on what variables are taken as independent). That’s one example. Others are the derivation of Eq.(6.22) and similar later derivations connected with generating functions, where partial derivatives are equated to zero on the grounds that they don’t depend explicitly on a particular variable, with the variables they do depend on explicitly being held constant (hence one gets zero). You get the right answer for the transformations (as it turns out through a proper derivation) but for the mathematically wrong reason, I think. I haven’t seen any other book adopt the approach presented here. Other than this the book is good, but I wasted a huge amount of time wondering whether I understood partial differentiation!By the way, I wrote to the lead author L. Hand about this. He didn’t agree with me and stopped corresponding when I wrote back to him. I presume he thought I was a crank. See what you think.

⭐Nice book.

⭐This book assumes that you are familiar with classical mechanics, and I thought that I was, but soon found that I needed a much more solid grounding in Newtonian methods.I did manage to get to the end of the first chapter, and answer many of the problems. Lots of worked examples would have helped a great deal, if only to help drive home the important points. I felt like I was being led somewhere, without having been told the destination, so I had no way to tell what was vitally important and what was merely incidental.The only worked example was right at the end of the chapter. Unfortunately, it was not posed as a question, so there was no way I could try to answer it myself first. Again, the feeling of being led somewhere, without knowing where.I eventually stopped reading this book, for the time being, having decided to backtrack to something more basic. I would prefer Lagrangian mechanics to appear well into a book, rather than thrust upon me on the third page.So I am now working on “Classical Mechanics” by Kibble and Berkshire. No Lagrangian mechanics until chapter 10, and I hope that after studying this chapter I will feel ready to return to Hand and Finch.

⭐This book is very useful for 2nd/3rd year undergraduate Physics students, to accompany Classical/Analytical Mechanics courses.

⭐A very good presentation of a subject of fundamental importance in physics. Any physics student must study this book before moving to more advanced topics like quantum mechanics

Keywords

Free Download Analytical Mechanics 1st Edition in PDF format
Analytical Mechanics 1st Edition PDF Free Download
Download Analytical Mechanics 1st Edition 1998 PDF Free
Analytical Mechanics 1st Edition 1998 PDF Free Download
Download Analytical Mechanics 1st Edition PDF
Free Download Ebook Analytical Mechanics 1st Edition