<p>I was just slightly curious, which text does Physics 125 at Caltech use?</p>
<p>It varies year to year; when Frank Porter was teaching it, there was no text, only notes: <a href="http://www.cithep.caltech.edu/%7Efcp/ph125/%5B/url%5D">http://www.cithep.caltech.edu/~fcp/ph125/</a> . This year it will be Shankar's Principles of Quantum Mechanics.</p>
<p>Last year we used Cohen-Tannoudhji(sp?). That book is ok, it has lots of material, but ultimately I disliked it. Nothing was more annoying than trying to locate something in CT when taking a timed exam. Shankar is much better for most topics. For some topics, Shankar was incomprehensible. I personally recommend Landau and Lif****z. You can buy it used for a small amount of money, and though it is advanced, it is extremely clear.</p>
<p>Its kindof funny that CCs forum bleeped out Lifshi tz.</p>
<p>Except for third term, we rarely were assigned book problems, which meant that we used whatever book we thought was best. I had CT, Shankar, and Landau. The only problem was that during exams we could only use CT, which isn't concise at all, so its hard to find stuff there. It wasn't that bad, just frustrating.</p>
<p>The classical counterpart to 125, 106, used much worse textbooks than 125. In fact, that was the primary disadvantage of the class. It also used problems from the books frequently. We used Hand and Finch, which I thought was worthless, and Griffiths, which was like a storybook. To be fair, it was possible to learn from Griffiths, and some people liked it. I think Hand and Finch damaged my knowledge. I tried to ignore it, and instead used Landau volume 1, Arnold, and eventually Goldstein. Landau 1 and Arnold are great books. For the electrodynamics part, I also used Jackson (which I bought very cheaply and accidentally because I thought it would be the course text before the
year started), and I bought a cheap Dover book written by Schwarz (sp?) as well as Landau volume 2, though I didn't really use either one. Using Griffiths
was alright on exams because it was easy to find stuff. </p>
<p>The moral is to find a textbook that you are comfortable with to actually learn the material. I plan to take my copy of Hand and Finch to the shooting range.</p>