This list was compiled in response to a question about what books should be included in a “starter kit" for a college library.
Astonishing masterpieces. I have read these books over and over again. They have been called “a physicist’s physics books”. Every physicist and every physics student should have instant access to them.
Many people are inspired by these books. As reference books or supplemental texts they are wonderful. As primary texts they are appropriate for some but not for all; weaker students get “indigestion" as Feynman himself noted in the epilogue.
This is good solid physics. (Don’t be put off by the title.)
Get the “Student Edition" – identical contents, half the price.
‘The” book on special relativity. Takes the geometric approach, which is far easier to understand than the older approach. Simple as well as profound. Intuitive as well as practical.
A masterpiece. The “Track 1" sections are quite readable, even poetic in places. Some “Track 2" sections are quite advanced.
The gold standard. Authoritative, but not particularly easy to read.
A wonderful book. Easy to read. Starts with the basics and progresses to advanced topics. Combines elegant theory with down-to-earth practical advice.
Far and away the most sensible thermo text I’ve seen. Gets right many things that other books get wrong. May be too terse for some students in introductory courses, i.e. some supplementary explanation of the key ideas may be helpful.
A standard. Surprisingly readable.
This book covers a huge range of material, starting at a low level and progressing to a high level. (I don’t think any human could learn it all in one year, so if you use the book as a text, a first course would have to stop in the middle ... and an advanced course would have to start in the middle. Either way, it makes a good reference book.)
All books on this topic suffer from a chicken-and-egg problem: you can’t understand the physics until you have learned the math, and you can’t motivate the math until you have learned the physics. This book deals with this issue better than most similar books. That is, the book is a bit dry, but not nearly as dry as you might have feared given the topic.
Beware: lots of misprints and typos in the equations ... but the ideas are there, with the usual Feynmanesque mixture of practicality and sophistication.
A monumental masterpiece.
I would hope the library already has this!
Exceptional, epochal high school physics text.
Some people love it, some look down on it ... which is fine for a library book (but not for a required text).
This contains the entire text of Sobel’s Longitude, plus illustrations.
The gold standard. Remarkably readable and remarkably informative.
Still worth reading, not just a conversation piece.
Actually what you want is Stillman Drake, Two New Sciences 2nd edition, which is a nicely annotated English translation of the above.
You can still learn from this book, even after all these years. It’s amazing how far Galileo got, especially considering how little he had to start with. Parts of it read like an open letter to Newton, telling him what to do. The book is more likely to appeal to hard-core physicists than to casual students.
A classic. Brilliant. Getting slightly dated in a few places, but still well worth reading.
Good algorithms, good focus on scientific applications, good explanations.
This not a good book, although is the best of a bad lot. The book includes some data-analysis software, which is a good idea in principle, but the quality of the software is terrible, including loops that could (and commonly do) loop forever, depending on the data.
The cover features a crashed train at the Gare Montparnasse.
A book list similar in spirit to this one can be found in reference 1 .
Note: When shopping for books, you should not place too much faith in the ratings on the amazon.com web site. It is disappointing but not terribly surprising that a merchant might find ways to filter out unflattering reviews. For an anecdote, see reference 2 .