I recently went back and bought a number of dover classics on physics and checked out some pieces from the library as well, and I’ve been relearning a lot of subjects I lightly touched on in class last year in a lot more depth.

Physics by Aristotle

Now, this hasn’t really been an easy process thus far. Not in the slightest. I only realized that Physics by Aristotle is not, in fact, about Physics but rather about philosophy long after I had already checked out the book from the library (because for some reason, I failed to actually read the book in the library when I first saw it). I’ve read something like 160 pages into the book thus far (if you include the introduction), and I just can’t bring myself to finish it. It’s just too boring.

Exploring Linear Algebra in MATLAB by Arangala

Next, there’s “Exploring Linear Algebra in MATLAB” by Crista Arangala. I’ve worked my way up to lab 17 out of 25 thus far, and it’s really been a doozy. It’s something of a lab manual for understanding linear calculations in MATLAB, and I found it useful since I’ll need to know MATLAB fairly soon and I had already tried some basic linear calculations in C and Lisp before starting (a post about that excursion is coming soon). I think I recommend this book, because it really gets straight to the point and focuses on spending most of the time either doing calculations or writing MATLAB code. What I learned most, however, was just how much I hate MATLAB. Doing some basic calculations in MATLAB can be a real pain, and it doesn’t help that MATLAB is proprietary software (so I use GNU Octave, a FOSS alternative that’s several decades behind the real thing). It’s been fun though, and it’s been a fun break from the calculus sequence that I’ve done since high school (that I’ve somewhat come to hate).

Thermodynamics by Fermi

This book confused me to no end. I found it very hard to follow at times, and there’s a strong lack of exercises (and I found the exercises that were there either too easy or too confusing without a good balance). I think I’ll write a longer blog post about this book, though, with some detailed notes on it and probably some exercise solutions in Python or Lisp.

Special Relativity by Smith

I’m really liking this book so far. Every problem I have with Thermodynamics by Fermi is solved fairly well in Special Relativity by Smith. I’m not very far quite yet, but from what I’ve read and done so far, there’s a breadth of exercises and they’re neither too easy nor too hard or vague. My only issue is that it feels like there can be information left out that is necessary to solve the exercises sometimes, and I only wish that they had included the answers to the exercises in the book (you have to find them online, like on StackExchange). I’ll probably also make a post on this of just my notes or work-throughs or something like that.