Special & General Relativity : A Beginner's Introduction to Basic & Advanced Concepts

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I don't have high expectations for books about serious advanced subjects. They are either too complex to learn from or they leave out much that needs to be explained. With this book, I was pleasantly surprised. The concepts are presented in a intuitive or at least a reasonable way and developed just enough to make them useful. Although I wouldn't recommend this book for someone that doesn't have some level of understanding of Special and General relativity, I do think that it would be a great text book for teaching to those that had a strong interest and were willing to "play" with the math involved. All-in-all a great addition to my library.

Book as Described

Because the writing and grammar is so bad, it's not possible to tell if the book is any good. The second sentence in the book reads "But mathematics makes our head heart because our brain is not trained to think abstractly, ..." It took me a while to figure out that the author meant "our head hurt." There is not a page that does not contain some sort of error that makes the whole thing incomprehensible. The book should be re- written by someone familiar with the English language.

This book gives good mathematical explanations of the covariant derivative of a tensor and derives the expression. Eddington's book I bought around 53 years ago does not explain the derivation of the covariant derivative of a tensor. This book explains the derivation of the curvature tensor. Some books just give the curvature tensor without deriving it. This is a great explanation of the general theory of relativity. As the author suggests I did not memorize all of the mathematical details but I get a good idea of the theory and its mathematical basis. I am especially happy I was able to read for free on Amazon Kindle Unlimited such a great book. But I wonder why so much credit was given to Einstein for the theory. Much of the mathematics was developed by others before him.I did graduate studies in physics so maybe my background was more than most people who read this book.

Its a half way there book, the author jumps around without clear links between topics, really unprofessional in explanation. If you have some background in Calculus and Physics you're better off reading more advanced books, or go for a more generalized book I did the former. I'd recommend Max Born's book its a real deal for general public. The is a wanna be book - the book is written by the author for the author not sure he would understand it if he read it again himseelf.

This book is not only full of grammatical errors but the author tries to use overly simplified analogies in an attempt to explain the difficult subject of General Relativity. Along the way, he makes sudden turns and shortcuts that are not really explained and leave even a sophisticated reader behind. Instead of this book, I recommend "The Einstein Theory of Relativity" by Lillian R. Lieber.

This is NOT a beginner's book. Even in the first 2 or 3 pages one needs advanced mathematics to understand it.

Livro introdutório bastante útil para o estudode Relatividade Especial e Geral.