Textbook layout and design

This textbook has a design that is just about perfectly backwards compared to most textbooks that currently cover the subject. Here are its primary design features:

• All mathematics required by the student is reviewed at the beginning of the book rather than in an appendix that many students never find.
• There are only twelve chapters. The book is organized so that it can be sanely taught in a single college semester with at most a chapter a week.
• It begins each chapter with an ``abstract'' and chapter summary. Detail, especially lecture-note style mathematical detail, follows the summary rather than the other way around.
• This text does not spend page after page trying to explain in English how physics works (which to my experience nobody reads anyway). Instead, a terse ``lecture note'' style presentation outlines the main points and presents considerable mathematical detail to support solving problems.
• Verbal and conceptual understanding is, of course, very important. It is expected to come from verbal instruction and discussion in the classroom and recitation and lab. This textbook relies on having a committed and competent instructor and a sensible learning process.
• Each chapter ends with a short (by modern standards) selection of challenging homework problems. A good student might well get through all of the problems in the book, rather than at most 10% of them as is the general rule for other texts.
• One to three problems per chapter are typically ``starred'' to indicate to the student that these are problems they must know how to solve if they wish to do well. These are problems that directly illustrate the relevant concepts and problem solving strategies.
• The textbook is entirely algebraic in its presentation and problem solving requirements - no calculators should be required to solve problems.
• Open source interactive programs (written for octave, an open source mathematical scripting language, but trivially portable to matlab or related environments) are provided to teach certain important lessons and enrich the material.

This layout provides considerable benefits to both instructor and student. This textbook supports a top-down style of learning, where one learns each distinct chapter topic by quickly getting the main points onboard via the summary, then deriving them or exploring them in detail and applying them to example problems, and finally asking the students to use what they have started to learn in highly challenging problems that cannot be solved without a deeper level of understanding than that presented in the text.