Physics

This is a great introductory text with good explanations and illustrations. It was assigned to cover both semesters of my introductory physics series in college. For one of those semesters I had a teacher who was uninterested in teaching and very unskilled at explaining, but by reading the chapters and doing the practice problems I did well in the class even though I learned next to nothing in lecture. You do have to take an active approach, though; don't just read, but work through the example problems in the text yourself and check your work and reasoning against the example solutions. Don't just read over the solution.A potential criticism is that many of the end-of-chapter problems require thinking beyond the information presented in the chapter. It can be frustrating, because the problems seem different than what was explained in the text, but they are solvable with the concepts presented and some thought. Working these kinds of problems forced me to think through the concepts I was learning rather than just plugging and chugging with formulas. Fortunately, many of the problems (I think most of the odd-numbered problems?) have solutions in the back, and some have explanations as well, so even if you are stuck on an even problem you can find a similar odd-numbered problem and figure it out from the answer.

The book offers a clean presentation, a nice load of graphics to help and show principles and examples, and is very well explained and easy to follow.Although it uses the algebraic method for all demonstrations and procedures, the main goal of explaining the principles of physics is achieved, so it is a very good tool for anyone wanting to learn by itself or in need to review some topics.The exercises go from well know basic ones to some deep thinking questions, allowing to apreciate the extents of the knowledge acquired.

As a post-bac student at a local public university, I found this text very helpful in understanding the principles and developing my problem-solving techniques in the second-semester of the algebra-based physics sequence. We had reading quizzes, so I read every chapter that corresponded to the course (chapters 16-30) and thus have much familiarity with the textbook. Walker generally presented clear, in-depth explanations for non-physics majors and provided a variety of worked example problems throughout each chapter. Some reviewers complained that he does not provide enough worked-examples, but you can't expect the author to show how to do every single type of physics problem encountered- the book would be too cumbersome and would defeat the problem-solving nature of physics.What I appreciated most, however, were the multitude of real-world applications interwoven throughout each chapter. The author eloquently connected the concepts presented to a diverse array of real-world objects and phenomena, such as bimetallic strips (heat), countercurrent exchange in the body (conduction), diesel engines (thermodynamics), printers (electrostatics), keyboards (capacitance), credit card readers (magnetic flux), rainbows (light), CD players (interference), just to name a few. This motivated me tremendously to learn the material, as I realized that all of it relates to our everyday life.I also found the chapter summaries and conceptual questions at the end of each chapter valuable for testing my understanding. Our class required Mastering Physics, which is an online platform that assigned the same problems as those at the end of each chapter. Walker provided a large variety of problems of easy, medium, and hard difficulty (indicated by the number of dots next to each problem), and doing a large variety of problems was absolutely crucial with developing my confidence in the material. Some of the problems were quite fun, as they related the physics principle to an everyday application. There were some mediocre problems in each chapter, but in my opinion, these were few and far between.The only issue I had with this text was that some of the sections were not clearly written and thus presented formulas and examples in a confusing way, such as chapter 28 regarding interference. Overall though, I found this text much superior to Giancoli's algebra-based text that I used in AP Physics B in high school; Walker's text gave more concise explanations, more worked-out examples, more diagrams/figures to illustrate the concepts, better homework problems, and more real-world applications. It also appears to be better than Cutnell and Johnson's text too. I highly recommend this text for an introductory physics course and for developing an appreciation of physics that is constantly at work in our daily lives.

This book arrived in great condition and I got it for a great price. It has a lot of good pictures to help with the concepts. Also, for the mastering physics, this book has some of the answers in it. Problems on mastering physics are very similar to the ones in the book.

Author should include sample problems that are difficult to solve so that a student learns to manipulate the data. If the author shows us ways to work problems we will be able to meet the challenges in a class setting.

This is one of the worst textbooks I've ever used. The example problems are very confusing. They do not reference material from earlier chapters so it's easy to get lost in the reasoning behind solving the problem. The actual chapters themselves do very little to explain physics to someone who doesn't easily grasp it. The end of chapter problems also expect you to be gifted in theoretical physics rather than providing building blocks and stepping stones to truly comprehending the material.

Good general physics book, doesn't really help you with calculus based physics, but gives you a good foundation in physics. Book was in poor poor shape with many stickers over it, but had all pages and was a great price

The book is very clear and concise. It gives you all the information you need to understand the concepts, has great example problems, and maintains interest without wasting pages explaining a bunch of irrelevant crap like other textbooks might.It's very concise and organized and is one of the reasons I've done well in my class.