In a time when “cheap” textbooks cost $75 and the usual cost for a semester of textbooks easily can tip the $500 scale, Dover Publications is a nice relief for the college student looking for a good reference on a budget. This Dover book, Classical Mechanics, written by H.C. Corben and Philip Stehle, is an excellent, although somewhat dated, textbook on classical dynamics.

What I enjoy most about this book is its early discussion of what is meant by “particle”, and the limitations of this notion. This is something that is very relevant to an understanding of classical mechanics, but seems noticeably absent from such standards as Goldstein. Another noteworthy aspect of the book, in my opinion, is its treatment of several non-standard topics. There is an entire chapter on particle orbits in high energy accelerators, and the appendix gives a great discussion of Riemannian geometry and the use of quaternions.

However, this textbook is not without its drawbacks. First of all, it’s old. This should be expected from most Dover editions, but the first edition was published in 1960, and the book was revised in 1994. Therefore, any real discussion of classical mechanics from the viewpoint of differential geometry is going to be absent. Also, this book is very, very terse. Unlike many modern textbooks, which will derive a result and then discuss its implications verbally at length, C&S will simply state the result and move forward. This is not a bad thing, per se, but if you are just starting to learn classical mechanics, this may be a little too much to handle.

Overall, this is a worthwhile book to own as a supplement to your existing classical mechanics textbook. It covers some nice subjects, the exercises are solid (although they don’t give quite the range of difficulty one might find in Sakurai, for instance), and the book is available from Amazon for $13.

Pros:

• Cheap. Very, very cheap.
• A solid quick read if you already have some familiarity with the subject.
• Covers some interesting but rarely covered topics in classical mechanics.

Cons:

• Old. You won’t get a discussion of nonlinear dynamics or chaos out of this book.
• Not much variety in the exercises at the end of the chapters.
• Terse to the point that it would be difficulty for a first study of classical mechanics, without support.