Students

If you are a student using this book to learn introductory physics, please note that this is a lecture note style book organized to support top-down learning. That is, it presents summaries and support material first and detail second, both in the chapter layout of the book itself and in each chapter in turn. Each chapter ends up with a set of examples followed by problems that most students (including very advanced ones and in some cases even the graduate assistants helping to teach the course) will find quite challenging.

Unlike many textbooks that present far more material than you could study and still be able to attend social engagements, sports events, the theater, and ``have a life'' at college, this textbook will clearly indicate the ``key'' problems - the ones you must fully understand in detail to have a hope of being able to solve problems on exams or quizzes. It also provides octave/matlab scripts that you can ``play'' with and use to improve your visualization skills and conceptual understanding on the one hand, and can also use to explore problems that are easy enough to formulate a solution to using what you learn but where the resulting equations cannot be solved analytically. In this way you can explore things like nonlinear systems (ones with damping and driving forces) that lead to some very interesting behavior usually omitted from intro physics courses.

To take maximal advantage of this and get the most learning out of the least work, you should proceed in the following way:

1. Quickly look over the whole book (now), to get an idea of what is covered in it. Read through the introductory material so you get some idea of the rationale used in its design. Start to build a mental picture of how ``physics works'' and how the course will hang together.
2. Skim read the Mathematics Review chapter (immediately following). Most of the material you see there should be a review, with the exception of some of the coverage of integrals, differential equations, and complex variables. Get an idea of what you don't know or easily recall and study it by reading the chapter in detail. Don't worry about working through it all or trying to ``learn'' it now; just remember what you find here later, as you'll likely want to come back to it when you are stumped by a piece of math in a physics problem.
3. For each chapter, read the chapter summary before your instructor starts lecturing on it. I've made this really easy for you - it is laid out neatly and is lecture-note concise. I leave it optional as to whether you skim-read the whole chapter before lecture - it is obviously a good idea, but only an extraordinarily good and motivated student will do it. So this is really a personal, existential choice about what you want to ``be''. Do you want to be an extraordinarily good student, or just get by? If the answer is ``just get by'' an obvious second question is ``why are you taking the course in the first place''? Either way, the choice is yours.
4. Listen in lecture instead of writing down everything your instructor says. I have tried to make this textbook complete in its presentation of the material and key derivations like few other textbooks at this level on the planet. Trust the textbook to be your set of ``lecture notes'' for the material, and instead of behaving like a transcribing machine with no higher cognitive processes occurring in lecture, spend your energy trying to understand the presentation and particular examples worked by your instructor.
5. Do the homework using the ``method of three passes'' explained below. Use the octave/matlab scripts provided for each chapter to explore the material. Participate in lab activities.

   I cannot emphasize how important this is. Hands-on work involving both halves of your brain (which includes doing lots of homework problems, running and playing with the octave/matlab scripts, and participating in ``lab'' activities) is the only way you will actually learn this material. Physics is not something that you can reduce to a large set of equations and memorize. It is something that is reduced to a small set of equations, definitions, and relations that you learn deeply to where you can derive solutions to all sorts of problems completely understanding what is going on both intuitively and algebraically at each step.

   If you are a typical student, this is nothing like anything you've ever done before, and when you learn how to do it in physics you will be smarter and more capable of solving problems in any field or domain than you were. This is the (often overlooked) reason to really study physics, not because you might ever need some particular concept from chapter seven in twelve years when you are a Doctor, a Lawyer, an Engineer, or for that matter an Author, a Businessperson, a Musician.

6. If you do your homework ``correctly'' as described and are well-supported in recitation, you will actually learn most of the material as you go and review for exams should end up being little more than looking over the chapter summaries again while redoing and reviewing the key problems.