A Modern Course in Statistical Physics

Excellent purchase. The product arrived speedily.

The best book on Statistical Physics and (also) in stochastic processes.

When I was in graduate school, it was a course book and I liked it. But when I was considering to buy 4th edition, it is to my surprise that it lost its almost its half. So look for 2nd edition.

This book does cover a range of topics with an emphasis more relevant to current and recent physical research than many other texts, and is generally well presented and explained. I turn to it along with Reif's Statistical Mechanics as standard references. I particularly liked the extensive discussion of probability theory and stochastic processes and their relevance to physics in Chapters 5 and 6. But this discussion is somewhat flawed in its mathematical details, particularly in connection with Markov chains. Actually this reflected my experience with the book as a whole -- a great collection of topics explained well in general, but not always when read in detail.

I own this book and I think it is a very good introduction to intermediate levelin statistical mechanics.

I found this book to be clumsy in its notation and sloppy in its delivery. The information presented in the book is more than comprehensive, however. Each chapter ends with a "special topics" section that covers new and old ideas in the field. Yet the book manages to fall short with its organization and presentation. When new concepts are introduced, very little background is given, and steps in calculations are often bypassed. There are many examples to follow, but even the examples seem pointless when the next step in the derivation has been skipped and it takes the reader several minutes to find the connection. In addition, the book is a somewhat poor reference in the way that many chapters cannot stand alone, due to the quirky notation that is scattered all over the book. If one is not familiar with this notation, then if one wishes to reference the book, he or she will have to waste time finding out why the author uses a capital N there and a small n here, a "mu prime" there and a "mu" here, or a vector k there and an apparently scalar k here.In summary, the book is comprehensive, covering a wide range of ideas both new and old, but it fails in the fact that it cannot present the information in a clear manner.

I used this textbook for a Graduate Statistical Mechanics course at Rutgers University.The Bad- terrible to learn concepts from for the first time. Makes almost no attempt to help develop intuitive feel for the concepts at hand. Problems and equations are presented with very little motivation or connection to the subject as whole. Derivations show sparse amount of steps, but with little explanation of how to get from one point to the other.- Typos?? This book has a surprising amount of errors in it, most problematically in the equations themselves.The good- Covers ALOT of material that the others (Pathria, Reif) don't get near such as Renormalization Groups and pretty much every single Special Topics sections at the end of the chapters. Although I found very little use for this textbook while taking the course (Landau & Pathria were the main books I looked to) I am glad to have it for my bookshelf since it seems to offer a lot of interesting reference on the more advanced subjects.

if you don't have enough energy to bite through from the beginning, stay away from this book. The key physics is largely buried under the (unnecessarily) heavy notations and equations.However, it may be a good source for reference.