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Cliffs Quick Review: Physics
Posted by Harry Tran on 08.20.09 @ 11:31
Alright, so I grabbed the closest product sitting next to my laptop and it just happened to be a CliffsQuickReview: Physics Book. This book is supposed to help you learn the essentials fast. Well, I'll be the judge of that. First of all, the image to the left shows what the book looks like. As you can see, the colors are purple and yellow with some black. Conveniently, those are the colors for the Los Angeles Lakers, my favorite NBA team. Well, that right there gives the book a couple of points.
I open the book and there is a little section about the authors, one of them is Linda Huetinck who has a PHD and is a professor of computer, mathematics and science education at california state university. The other author, Scott V Adams is only earning his PHD in Physics so he's not a pro yet. The unfortunate thing about the authors is that their academic fields are physics; this is a bad thing because everybody knows physics professors are terrible teachers. I'm sorry but thats minus fifty points.
Oh look, theres a little cheat sheet inside that summarizes all the main concepts in physics. How cool! Newtons Laws of Motion, Keplers Laws of Planetary Motion, Pascals Principle, Archimedes Principle... wait a minute, theres nothing about circuits on this page. Strike two Doctor Huetinck and Wanna-be-doctor Adams; this book is in the hands of a Neural Engineer who happens to like circuits and you left it off the cheat sheet. I almost threw the book out the window but then decided to try to learn some physics, so here we go.
Alright, so I decided I wanted to learn some basic circuitry, you know, Ohms Law and stuff like that. So naturally, I turn to the page talking about circuits and what do i see? Lots of text. Where are the pix? How is a man supposed to learn without pix? That, my friends, is strike three. I promptly put the book down and returned to doing something more mind-stimulating: Tetris.
So in conclusion, if you are a student trying to learn physics, I would highly recommend this book because it is pretty easy to go through (although confusing in some parts) and you can learn all of it in a week or even a couple days if you try really hard. On the other hand, if you couldn't care less whether or not energy is conserved or what happens when a rocket is shot at a 45 degree angle, don't bother reading this book unless you're me (i took one for the team).