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I'm a fan. I've bought a number of David McMahon DeMystified books like "Quantum Field Theory", "Linear Algebra", "Relativity" and "Matlab". Or problems at the end of each chapter that no one but Google could solve.David McMahon does a great job, taking you step by step, through problem after problem. I'm hoping he'll consider writing a book on "Particle Physics and the Standard Model". But many of those errors were fixed in the current release. I think many of the reviews of "Quantum Mechanics DeMystified" are missing the point.
But they loose you in the details.In the middle of a topic, there's complex proofs that add nothing to the material being presented. All of them, got me started on subjects, that other books that used a textbook approach, just left me hanging. David McMahon, gets you through each topic, in a clear logical manner, step by step, that few books on the topic, come close to matching. And yes, not all errors may have been corrected.But I thought so much of this book, I purchased a second copy, that contained most of the known corrections.This book is a great supplement to books like thosed mentioned above.And its also a great supplement to free iTunes U courses on Quantum Mechanics like those from Leonard Susskind from Stanford Universityor James Binney from Oxford University. It would be a great supplement toLeonard Susskinds currect lecture series on iTunes U or YouTube titled "New Revolutionsin Particle Physics: The Standard Model" Many other books start off well, like"Principles of Quantum Mechanics" by Shankar, "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by Griffiths, or "The Structure And Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" by Hughes.
Yes, there were errors in the first release of this book.
They do stupid stuff like using + instead of = or writing the wrong exponent on a variable, but they also skrew up important equations from time to time. This book is so full of mistakes, it's hard to follow. I would definitely NOT recommend this text. I'm wasting a lot of time in my reading of this text trying to figure out when and where the book went wrong. The examples skip over a lot of the math, occasionally making it difficult to figure out how they got from point A to point B. This is made even worse by the fact that the answer they end up with might be full of typos.
The books does need some editing--there are quite a number of typos, especially at the beginning of the book--but it's still a great resource, and perfect for someone (like myself) looking for a quantum refresher. I got more out of this book than from two semesters of university-level quantum.
I think the author should apologize for making a quick buck, correct the problems and send a free book to all of us who actually wanted to learn physics by working through problem sets. This book does strike awe and amazement in the reader, but only because of the sheer volume of inaccuracies and discrepancies riddled throughout it.
The mathematics are more clearly laid out in DeMystified but concepts are not explained and there are few definitions to be found. I found without an intensive mathematics background Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (2nd Edition) by David J. Griffiths to be a more productive read.
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