Physics GRE Discussion Forums

These are the books that i have decided to study from for PGRE...Any advice and recommendations are needed.....

Fundamentals of Physics : Halliday, Resnick and Walker
Introduction To Electrodynamics : David J. Griffiths
Introduction To Quantum Mechanics : David J. Griffiths
Optics : E Hecht
Heat and Thermodynamics : Mark W Zemansky and Richard Dittman
Feynman's Lectures


please tell me what you think....thank you..

Rose.w wrote:These are the books that i have decided to study from for PGRE...Any advice and recommendations are needed.....

Fundamentals of Physics : Halliday, Resnick and Walker
Introduction To Electrodynamics : David J. Griffiths
Introduction To Quantum Mechanics : David J. Griffiths
Optics : E Hecht
Heat and Thermodynamics : Mark W Zemansky and Richard Dittman
Feynman's Lectures


please tell me what you think....thank you..

Fundamental of Physics should be your primary study tool. Both of the Griffiths books are good but only the first few chapters are relevant to the PGRE. Not familiar with Hecht's optics or Heat and Thermo but I'm sure they will be fine. Most of the optics were, in my opinion, very rudimentary (i.e. ray tracing and thin lens equations) and you'll probably only need the first few sections.

HappyQuark wrote:

Rose.w wrote:These are the books that i have decided to study from for PGRE...Any advice and recommendations are needed.....

Fundamentals of Physics : Halliday, Resnick and Walker
Introduction To Electrodynamics : David J. Griffiths
Introduction To Quantum Mechanics : David J. Griffiths
Optics : E Hecht
Heat and Thermodynamics : Mark W Zemansky and Richard Dittman
Feynman's Lectures


please tell me what you think....thank you..

Fundamental of Physics should be your primary study tool. Both of the Griffiths books are good but only the first few chapters are relevant to the PGRE. Not familiar with Hecht's optics or Heat and Thermo but I'm sure they will be fine. Most of the optics were, in my opinion, very rudimentary (i.e. ray tracing and thin lens equations) and you'll probably only need the first few sections.

Thank you....
do you recommend any other books??
and should i get the PGRE big book...????

If by "PGRE big book" you mean the purple REA book, opinions of that are already posted all over this forum. Hecht is a good optics reference in general, so you should be OK with that. I'm not familiar with that particular thermo book. I think Halliday covers all you would need for thermo anyway.

Other resources I've heard are good are Schaum's Outline of Applied Physics and Problems in General Physics by Irodov. Irodov is currently only published in India, but you can find it on used book websites for ~$15. The US edition has been out-of-print for a while so it is very expensive. Schaum's is also ~$15, so both are inexpensive and generally obtainable. Your university may have these on their shelves as well.

Minovsky wrote:If by "PGRE big book" you mean the purple REA book, opinions of that are already posted all over this forum. Hecht is a good optics reference in general, so you should be OK with that. I'm not familiar with that particular thermo book. I think Halliday covers all you would need for thermo anyway.

Other resources I've heard are good are Schaum's Outline of Applied Physics and Problems in General Physics by Irodov. Irodov is currently only published in India, but you can find it on used book websites for ~$15. The US edition has been out-of-print for a while so it is very expensive. Schaum's is also ~$15, so both are inexpensive and generally obtainable. Your university may have these on their shelves as well.

Right......I am in India...so Irodov and Schaum's are not a problem....
and i am ditching the purple book...