Much easier to name the worst ones. Mark Trodden might remember Nelkon and Parker from A Level physics. Appalling.

Best highschool physics book (this from the UK, where more physics is taught at highschool) is Whelan and Hodgson’s ‘Essential Principles of Physics’, in my opinion.

Best undergrad book, I think, is, hmm, I don’t know: Finn’s Thermal Physics. Maybe. I actually quite liked Duffin’s Electromagnetism. And the Paul Davies Quantum Theory book is good for such a little book.

May I suggest the Feynman Lectures ?
The best way to learn what physics is all about IMHO.

Feynman’s Lectures On Physics is the Greatest Physics Textbook that I haven’t yet read… but browsing years ago got me fascinated and thoughtful, and marked it as a ‘must read’.

But more generally my first calculus textbook (Bers/Karal in my case) since it showed the revolutionary idea of wholly consistent theories (exemplified by axiomatic theorems and proofs) instead of the seemingly disconnected facts in earlier curricula.

Panofsky/Phillips for classical EM because it build clearly from theory to application. My copy is worned out.

MTW Gravitation is bought and shelved for much the same reason as Feynman’s LOP. It is remarkable how ‘must read’ becomes ‘will eventually read’ with (sufficient amounts of insufficient) time…

Adam: It is essentially physics book, since no self-respecting mathematician ever learned that material in that way. Way too clear and…..straightforwardly useful.

-cvj

You’re right there, Clifford. Shey even cracks the odd joke, I think, and everyone knows that a mathematician’s face is liable to break if they have to smile.

That’s brilliant. I might elevate that to the Friday poem….!

-cvj

Slightly off topic, but the last comment reminded me of another cute little math poem…

int_(1)^(sqrt(3)) z^2 dz cos(3pi/9) = ln e^(1/3)
which is…

“The integral of z squared dz
from 1 to the square root of 3
times the cosine
of 3 pi over 9
equals log of the cube root of e”

Don’t know who’s the author of that one tho

Algebraic poems in raw LaTeX?

Make it stop!

Back when I was in math grad school, I learned vector calculus from Div, Grad, and Curl and All That. So there.

Whilst on the subject of maths books, Horn and Johnson’s ‘Matrix Analysis’ is pretty handy (and very detailed; the companion volume ‘Topics in Matrix Analysis’ is a little more specific to a few topics). Although I’m not sure that I could sit down and read a whole chapter of it in one go, even.

Does quantum mechanics ‘mean’ anything, though?

I’m not asking to be difficult, incidentally. I’ve had plenty of conversations about this with various people (who worry about this sort of stuff to varying degrees), and I’m really not sure that asking if it ‘means’ anything is even the right sort of question, like asking how many miles per gallon you get out of your salt shaker*. Or, I should say, I’m not convinced that it’s a good question.

*Well, maybe you could imagine seeing how far you could walk trailing salt before you needed to refill, but you get my general drift, I trust.

Well, the classics are covered so:

Dirac’s General Theory of Relativity

Jackson’s E&M

Wightman’s PCT

Schiff’s Quantum Mechanics

Binney & Tremaine’s Galactic Dynamics

Shapiro & Teukolsky’s Physics of Compact Objects

Lightman & Rybicki’s Radiative Transfer

Although I’d vote for Feynman followed by Landau & Lifshitz’s Classical Theory of Fields and MTR’s Gravitation

Yes, CapitalistImperialistPig, it did come from your suggestion. Thanks. I promised I would do it, and so here it is. -cvj

Try as I might, I just can’t go past the books that make up the Landau course in theoretical physics. These succinctly written books teach you everything you need to know to get a good undergraduate-level physics education and nothing more. There is none of the extraneous bullshit that pads out some other textbooks. The other thing about Landau’s course is that its explanations are really original, like they’ve come from the mind of a man who established most of his knowledge of physics by deriving it himself from basic principles, as opposed to learning it step-by-step from textbooks. A truly independent thinker, in other words. I suppose most colleagues of Landau would have classified him as such, but for me it really comes through in his physics texts.

And to continue the theme of highly original thinkers, the 3-volume lectures of Feynman are an ideal prelude to Landau’s books. They do a great job in sending you on your way to thinking like a physicist.

Has nobody mentioned anything by griffiths? The man is a master! Easily the best two physics textbooks I have used are his QM and his Electrodynamics book. Sakurai’s QM comes a close third behind those. I guess if I had to choose one it would have to be Griffiths Electrodynamics. Just last night I got caught up reading his near perfect chapter on radiaton when I should have been otherwise studying for general exams. It brought tears to my eyes.

To the comment above, I’ve used the Kittle Thermal Physics book, and think it sucks. It also happened to start falling apart on the third day I owned it, a phenomena that I found was not constrained to my copy.

It’s very startling to read this thread and realize that I do have fond memories of some of my undergraduate physics textbooks. What is wrong with me?

I only survived stellar physics through Dmitri Mihalas’s Stellar Atmospheres — the first edition, not the second. In the second edition he went tensor-crazy, but the first edition is clear, straightforward, and completely impossible to find. But it is absolutely the best stellar physics book I have ever encountered.

I must second the vote for Carroll & Ostlie’s An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, which got me through undergrad and has even been useful in graduate school. I recommend it to all the incoming astro grads who haven’t had many astronomy classes yet. Also, Binney & Tremain’s Galactic Dynamics is amazing — comprehensive but still very straightforward.

Back to undergrad physics, I agree that the Griffiths E&M text is excellent for an undergrad text, but I didn’t think his quantum book was in-depth enough. It was good enough to get me through undergrad, but hasn’t been a useful reference since.

And, a third vote for the Kittel and Kroemer Thermal Physics as The Worst Physics Textbook! What a useless piece of crap that fell apart before I could even abuse it. I will certainly be watching this thread for good thermo book recommendations.

It’s hard to beat the Feynman lectures for out and out enjoyment, but the textbook from which I think I learned the most from was “Quantum Mechanics” by Cohen-Tannoudji, Diu and Laloe.

Funny story about Jackson’s E&M book. At Caltech, we used Jackson for our undergraduate physics E&M course. When I first showed up in Berkeley to start my Ph.D., they had a mixure for the incoming graduate student and the faculty. Jackson was there, along with my roommate from Caltech. My roommate walked up to Jackson without introducing himself and simply said “Your book almost killed me.” The moments of silence as Jackson tried to figure out how to respond were priceless.

David Morin’s textbook-in-progress for Harvard’s honors intro mechanics course (click on the “Textbook” link on the left) will be a classic as soon as enough people are exposed to it, I’m sure. It’s the book I wish I learned that stuff from. Incredibly clear explanations (including whole chapters on checking units and limiting cases, two things that every student should get used to doing from the get-go) and a staggering number of worked problems.

And speaking of poetry, it has dozens of physics limericks. (Which I can take or leave, but YMMV.)

I’d also be interested in good Stat Mech/Thermo textbook recommendations. I recall learning bits and pieces from many different books, but it was always a challenge to connect the presentation of an idea in one text with that in another. Some of the better ones were Reif, Landau & Lifshitz and Chandler.

And Mazenko’s “Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics” definitely gets my nod for worst Stat Mech textbook. Everything is in there and formalized, but with very little physical motivation. Also, he numbers his equations from 1 to 2898, and the index is hopeless. Ugh.

Textbooks I *did* like and learned a lot from were:

– Schutz, First Course in General Relativity
– Griffiths, Introduction to E&M
– Ashcroft & Mermin, Solid State Physics
– Shankar, Principles of Quantum Mechanics
– Sean Carroll’s GR Lecture Notes

I hear good things about Scott Dodleson’s Modern Cosmology and Sean’s GR book, but I haven’t had the privilege of reading them yet.

Oh, boy, I do like my books, so this could take a while.

The best undergrtaduate courses I took had no textbooks (one example is “famous paradoxes in physics” with Yakir Aharonov, which was taught withuot any notes), but there were several really nice books along the way: mechanics and quantum mechanics of the Landau-Lifschitz series (though I don’t like the rest much), stat mech by Reif, differential geometry by Spivak, and more…

My favorite was “gravitation and cosmology” by Weinberg. I was lucky enough to take 5-6 semester worth of courses from him later, and discover why I liked it so much. It is the exact reason why many people dislike his books- it is all about the details. You will not come out of reading his books with a bird’s eye view of the subject, or with an appreciation of its mysterious and intricate elegance. What you will get instead is an extremely detailed knowledge of the subject, up to the last factor of 2: no stone unturned, no unexplained mysteries, it is all there.

When I was at Caltech many years ago, I think I was one of the only students in my class who read more than a couple chapters of the Feynman lectures. Of course back then you could still get a live performance from the man himself. If only I had known about them in high school; we didn’t have the internet or Amazon back then, and I was stuck with the sublimely awful Haliday and Resnik for all of my physics needs.

Clifford,

How about the best reference book? there are some beautiful books that are just too specialized to be textbooks in an actual course, though they would make fine textbooks for fantasy courses. Two examples:

Methods in Field Theory, proceedings of Les Houches 1975.

Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers, Bender and Orszag.

and on textbooks: I’ve been looking a bit at “Biological Physics” by Philip Nelson (the former string theorist), looks pretty nice, I hear students here like it…

How about Sean’s Book?

You know the one. You know you want it!

I just thought i would chime in with everyone else and say that the 3 volumes of Feynman’s lectures on physics wins this hands down.

It’s a bit premature for that! Furthermore, that is definitely a pointless discussion. While there is no clear such thing as a greatest physics paper, or textbook, you get tremendous value discussing the issue and trading knowledge of several examples. The same cannot be said (certainly not to the same extent) for your suggested category! ….

Cheers,

-cvj

About a Griffiths book: It brought tears to my eyes.

A lot of physics and math books have had this effect on
me – but probably not in the way you meant.

I’m not sure what my favourite physics text book is… but it is not Intro to QM by Griffiths. (I did like his EM book though.)
How can you seriously write an introduction to quantum mechanics, and start with the Schrödinger equation on page 1, after barely 10 lines of text? Shouldn’t you say something about why anyone would want something new after the successes of classical mechanics? Give some indication as to why it might be a good idea to try and describe particles using a wave?
It didn’t bring tears to my eyes, but I was actually angry to see as the first paragraph of the section on (the quantum mechanical description of) the atom a very classical description of an atom as a nucleus with electrons flying in circular orbits around it. Wait a minute, weren’t there supposed to be wavefunctions and stuff, instead of particles tracing a well-defined path?

I learned QM from Bransden and Joachain, which was perfectly fine for me.

Why do so many people love the Classical Theory of Fields? I thought it was by far the least useful of the Landau and Lifshitz books: the discussion of gravity is pretty outdated. Much more fun are Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics and Statistical Mechanics.

This is a difficult vote to hold, because I think there are two kinds of physics textbooks:
1 – the books we learn things from (for the first time)
2 – the books we remember things from
I learned QM from Griffiths, but I would never look anything up in that book. I would go to Sakurai or Landau and Lifshitz instead.

My current favourite textbook is Zwiebach’s A First Course in String Theory, it’s so easy to read, making it one of the rare text books you can read cover to cover. It does have its failings in terms of using the light-cone gauge almost all the way through, but when you consider the intended audience is undergrads this is easy to let pass by. No other modern text book comes close in making string theory so clear.

I don’t think the Landau & Lifshitz series should count as one textbook, otherwise this is a dead discussion. Who can’t love a series that begins teaching mechanics by defining that a particle is a point of mass?

Some other favourites of mine that have not been mentioned:

Hawking and Ellis: The Large Scale Structure of Space-time,

Nash and Sen: Topology and Geometry for Physicists (older but smaller than Nakahara)

Cahn: Semi-Simple Lie Algebras and their Representations (hard to read, but rewarding and concise, oh and free)

Guenault: Statistical Physics

Does anyone else have strong feelings about any of these?

Are there good physics books? The physics books I’ve read are so completely filled with non-sequiturs and leaps of logic that the only way I could ever learn physics was via oral transmission.

Paul, I’ve always thought that Nakahara was a million times better than Nash and Sen, don’t you think? Nakahara’s book (Geometry, Topology and Physics) is surprisingly readable, I learned a great deal from it. With Nash and Sen, I’m sure the information is there, but I have trouble getting it out.

I found Nakahara’s book quite readable too. I wish it was published when I was first learning the subject. At the time I used “analysis, manifolds, and physics” by Dewitt-Morette, Choquet-Bruhat, and Dillard-Bleick, which had a very steep learning curve. Later I liked the review paper by Eguchi, Gilkey, and Hanson, which I thought was easier to read than the “analysis, manifolds, and physics” book.

Interesting thread! Here is the list that turned a mathematician into a theoretical physicist:

Foundations of Mechanics by Abraham & Marsden
Statistical Mechanics by K. Huang
Quantum Mechanics by Sakurai
Quantum Physics by Glim & Jaffe
Spacetime and Geometry by Sean…

Personaly, I never found the Nash/Sen, Nakahara and DeWitt/… very readable. I don’t know of any book that covers related topics in a single place AND that I liked. To fill the gap, I used the following texts:

Anomalies in QFT by Bertlmann
Differential analysis on complex manifolds by Wells
Compact Riemann surfaces by Narasimhan

By the way, what about QFT? Learning QFT from all well-known textbooks has always been painful for me!

I liked Halliday and Resnick. I even learned stuff from it when I was in grad school. If I could only keep one book, it might well be that one.

I loved the Griffiths book on Particle Physics.

I give a thumbs up to Schutz, A First Course in General Relativity.

I like Jackson’s book on E&M. Not as an undergraduate text, though, no way. Purcell’s book is real good and easy to understand.

I also liked Sakurai’s book on QM but not the one by Cohen-Tannoudji, et al; thought that one was truly awful to try to learn from.

I had Ohanian as my bumper book of everything in low detail. Wasn’t bad, I guess, broad but shallow.

Isham’s Group theory book is good (as is his QM book I mentioned earlier). His differential geometry book is good, but being at his lectures is even better.

Isham also deserves points for using the word ‘peristalithic’ in a most excellent way, in his QM book.

On a slight tangent, anyone have any recommendations for textbooks in subjects like fluid dynamics, hydrodynamics, elasticity, etc … (ie. subjects they use to teach in standard undergraduate physics courses a long time ago, but no longer really do anymore today). Landau & Lifshitz’s books on these subjects were ok, though I didn’t find them to be very readable for non-experts.

I find Nakahara as a useful reference, but any actual learning on the subject has come from geometry/topology books. There are surprisingly few good books on this subject (well, geometry, really, for topology there are the excellent Hatcher and Munkers), so far I like Darlings “differential forms and connections,” the best.

Will nobody nominate Hartle’s relativity book? It’s very readable, and gets your hands dirty with actual calculations as opposed to doing hoity toity (sp?) geometry all the time. It think it’s the ideal introduction to the subject, followed up by a more formal book like Sean’s (which I still haven’t looked at!) or Wald’s (do you guys talk smack at faculty meetings about who has the better book?) Any time I’ve gone to MTW for information, only sadness has resulted. I keep it on my bookshelf to impress the chicks, though.

What the heck’s with differential forms being like “bongs of a bell”, anyway?

When I teach the undergraduate GR course, I use Hartle’s book. And when Hartle teaches the graduate course, he uses mine. They fit together quite well, actually.

But of course there is no such thing as the perfect introduction, since different people respond to different approaches. A good illustration is the feelings people have toward Weinberg, Wald, and MTW, three books that couldn’t be more different from each other. For any one of these books, you can find people who love them with all their heart, and people who hate them with a white-hot passion. My goal was to write a book that most people would basically like, without getting too emotional.

Adam,

Most of the engineering people I knew over the years, all thought their undergraduate textbooks for subjects like fluid dynamics, hydrodynamics, elasticity, etc … were largely “brain dead” crap for the most part.

The more “theory minded” engineers I knew over the years, seemed to like the books written by Jerrold Marsden on fluid mechanics, elasticity, etc … (Marsden also wrote several books on classical mechanics using the modern differential geometry language). Other books they liked were the many books written by Vladimir I. Arnold on hydrodynamics and mechanics (in general).

I found most of Marsden and Arnold’s books also a bit on the “steep learning curve” side. I guess what I have in mind for textbooks are ones which are not too “brain dead” (like the many undergraduate engineering textbooks on fluid dynamics, hydrodynamics, elasticity, heat/mass transfer, etc …), but are also not too advanced like Marsden and Arnold’s books.

With respect to GR, I found both Sean’s book and Hartle’s book quite readable. When I first learned GR, I made the mistake of trying to learn from Dirac’s GR book. (At the time I was naively thinking, “70 pages shouldn’t be too tough”). A week later I came across MTW’s book, and came to the realization it was even harder than Dirac’s book. After these two false starts, I ended up going through Weinberg’s GR book, which I still like a lot today. Years later I came across Schutz’s GR book, which I also liked a lot.

Speaking of Dirac, I also made the silly mistake of trying to learn quantum mechanics from Dirac’s QM book. I got frustrated very quickly after a week or so at the time. (My father had Dirac’s QM and GR books on the living room bookshelf). Then I learned quantum mechanics from various physical chemistry textbooks, which usually presented it in a “watered down” manner. Eventually I ended up using books like Merzbacher and Schiff, which I thought were kind of on the dry and “boring” side.

The closest book I’ve ever seen which could be a “quantum mechanics for dummies” book (only requiring knowledge of freshman calculus), would be McQuarrie’s “quantum chemistry” textbook. For really basic quantum mechanics, I like McQuarrie’s book more than most other introductory QM textbooks. Though the main shortcoming of McQuarrie’s book is that it’s mainly concentrating on solving Schrodinger’s equation with applications to molecular systems, and very little else (ie. no raising & lowering operator formalism, no potential scattering, no matrix mechanics formalism, no Dirac bra & ket formalism, no addition of angular momentum, etc …). Nevertheless McQuarrie’s book does cover a lot of ground and is very readable, in a writing style similar to David Griffiths’ textbooks. I wish McQuarrie’s “quantum chemistry” textbook was published when I was first tried to learn quantum mechanics.

There is a rather good book i have read called D-Branes published by cambridge university press. I forget the author I think it deserves a mention, but then my phd project is on branes so maybe i’m a bit biased.

Other books -
Foundations of quantum groups by shaun majid (though prof majid gave me a print out of that for free so again bias). Takes quantum groups to the point needed to understand their relation to noncommutative geometry.

Also one that picks me out having been a durham undergraduate:
Armstrong – basic topology. all the information is there for very basic stuff (it even has an appendix telling you what a group is) and pretty pictures of klein bottles and things.

Coming back from two weeks of holiday, most on the topic has been said. But here are my favourites:

Number one are by far the Feynman Lectures (Vol. I and II). From these I learned how physicists think.

When it comes to a GR text, it’s clearly MTW. And yes, a tensor is a machine with slots (egg crates etc) and not something with indices that transforms in a particular way (as Weinberg wants to make you believe). [I have to admit, I haven't really looked at Sean's book,yet].

Both these are 100% pure fun to read but admittedly, none of them can probably be used to accompany a lecture course. This is why many people who were busy with their courses never properly used them. Due to biographical oddities (three months of spare time between highschool and uni for Feynman, one year of compulsory [German] community/civil service after two years of uni) I actually read these books from beginning to end. I doubt that many other people can claim this. But it’s worth!

In addition, our library had a German/English bilingual edition of the Feynman lectures. So besides physics I could also learn physicists’ English (which is different from the literature English I learned in highschool).

Some other books: Jackson makes a great mouse pad and I have used it to this end for years. Plus it contains everything you ever wanted to know about boundary value problems. But clearly it’s not fun to read.

The writeup of Witten’s lectures in the IAS physics lectures for mathematicians contain lots of interesting insights.

And there is (admittedly not a physics text) “Concrete Mathematics” by Graham, Knuth (the Knuth of TeX) and Patashinik. This is a math book for computer scientists. It’s my standard reference for formulas containing binomials, for generating functions, sums, recurrence relations, and asymptotic expressions. And (probably thanks to Knuth) it’s full of jokes and fun observations. And there are hundreds of problems of a variety of difficulties, rated from “warmups” to “research problems”. Therefore it’s also a source for Great Wakering.

Finally, there are the books by Landau and Lifshits. Since my first mechanics course. I have a strong disliking for them, probably based on my own poor judgement. When I first opened vol. 1 I was confused (admitedly I shouldn’t have been) by the fact that they use brackets for the vector product rather than times like everybody else. Okok, it’s a Lie bracket but still, it makes formulas ugly. And then there is the infamous appendix on what a great guy Landau has been.

Marco Zagermann, who was in my year can still recite the highlights from this appendix: About the logarithmic scale for physicists and how Landau promoted himself on this scale later in his life, how he only read the abstracts of the papers in the Physical Review and then judged the papers either as pathological or how he rederived the results of the paper just from the abstract for himself. And there are more pearls like this.

Yes! I believe I mentioned it earlier in the thread. It is an excellent QFT book. One of the best introductions I’ve ever seen!

-cvj

Personally I think that Feynman Lectures on Physics cannot be beaten. I also enjoyed very much Tipler’s “Modern Physics” because of the brilliant, yet simple, way he explains quantum mechanics and atomic theory, although some demonstrations are a bit too incomplete and some of them even “not so correct” too say the least, but it can be compensated by complementary study of Landau’s “Course in Theoretical Physics”.
By the way, for a undergrad like myself, the end of chapter exercises in Landau’s book are far from straightforward.

The discussion is still on! I said I would let it run for a while. We will move to the next phase soon. Fear not. Not too late to make more pitches….

I’ll need to sit down and make a short list of five, as promised. Then you get to vote. Exciting eh? Physics by democracy…

-cvj

The books by Landau and Lifshitz are very good.

QFT: The book by Ryder is ok for undergraduate students.

GR: ”A short course in General Relativity” by J. Foster and J.D Nightingale can be used for undergraduate students.

Statistical Mechanics: The book by F. Reif (forgot the title).

I just came across Pauli’s article on Relativity in the Encyclopaedie der mathematischen Wissenschaften. An english translation of the same by G. Field was brought out by Pergamon Press. Though not exactly intended as a text book when written, this article by Pauli (written when he was around 20) can definitely serve as a wonderful textbook for GR.

And by the way, when do you plan to make pronouncements about the winners of this and the other running competitions on this blog?

hack on Aug 25th, 2005 at 12:49 pm

When I was at Caltech many years ago, I think I was one of the only students in my class who read more than a couple chapters of the Feynman lectures. Of course back then you could still get a live performance from the man himself. If only I had known about them in high school; we didn’t have the internet or Amazon back then, and I was stuck with the sublimely awful Haliday and Resnik for all of my physics needs.

Are you talking about the Physics X (undergrad) course taught by Feynman? Someone I know (Caltech Physics grad, Class of ’77) was telling me about how it was a Q&A format, to give the students a “demo” of how a physicist solved a problem.

Funny thing, I used Halliday & Resnick for the Phys 106 course (part of the undergrad 106/107/108 curriculum at UIUC, designed by Leo Lavatelli..a Caltech alumni who was a classmate of Robert Leighton..who was involved with the Feynman Lectures). Funny thing, we never had any exposure to the Feynman Lectures..although I remember thumbing thru it in the library. I now have the 3 volume set, & plan to go thru it in the near future.

sidenote:
Recently, I ran into Alan Leighton over our common interest in chasing solar eclipses (http://www.comet-track.com/eclipse/secl.html) & he mentioned how his dad was a physicist, wrote a modern physics text, used to take him up in the San Gabriel mtns for Comet Ikeya-Seki, etc. I didn’t know at the time, WHO Robert Leighton was. You might recall a Ralph Leighton (Feynman’s protege), as seen on that NOVA episode on Feynman & Tannu Tuva..that’s Alan’s brother.

well, i think this is a lot of personal taste…you know it depends if you are going for a monograph or pedagogy or writing style.

For pedagogy, i think many (american?) students agree
that griffiths’ textbooks (EM and QM) are both masterpieces. It’s too bad that no classical mechanics or statistical mechanics books share the same place.

My personal taste regarding other pedagogical textbooks is: bowley and sanchez for undergrad stat. mech., and I really liked landau for classical mechanics, but i realize that it’s not to everyone’s taste. I’ve never read Reid, but i hear that’s a good stat mech book also.

at the graduate level,
I’ve never put down Ryder’s QFT.
I think there are many good quantum books: shankar, baym, and sakurai come to mind. I enjoy both McQuarrie and Pathria for stat mech… Actually, McQuarrie in general i think it a really good author, i’ve read a few of his books now. I like fetter and walecka for classical mechanics at this level…but i dont really have a favorite here.

Some others worth mentioning: Strogatz’s nonlinear dynamics, Bruus and Flensberg wrote a nice MBT book, and Tritton’s fluids is nice reading.

ok..i’m done with my two cents. if i omitted subjects it’s because i dont have any text that sticks out at exemplary of great instruction and i am neglecting good monographs altogether.