Textbook Layout and Design

This textbook has a design that is just about perfectly backwards compared to most textbooks that currently cover the subject. Here are its primary design features:

• All mathematics required by the student is reviewed at the beginning of the book rather than in an appendix that many students never find.
• There are only twelve chapters. The book is organized so that it can be sanely taught in a single college semester with at most a chapter a week.
• It begins each chapter with an ``abstract'' and chapter summary. Detail, especially lecture-note style mathematical detail, follows the summary rather than the other way around.
• This text does not spend page after page trying to explain in English how physics works (prose which to my experience nobody reads anyway). Instead, a terse ``lecture note'' style presentation outlines the main points and presents considerable mathematical detail to support solving problems.
• Verbal and conceptual understanding is, of course, very important. It is expected to come from verbal instruction and discussion in the classroom and recitation and lab. This textbook relies on having a committed and competent instructor and a sensible learning process.
• Each chapter ends with a short (by modern standards) selection of challenging homework problems. A good student might well get through all of the problems in the book, rather than at most 10% of them as is the general rule for other texts.
• The problems are weakly sorted out by level, as this text is intended to support non-physics science and pre-health profession students, engineers, and physics majors all three. The material covered is of course the same for all three, but the level of detail and difficulty of the math used and required is a bit different.
• The textbook is entirely algebraic in its presentation and problem solving requirements - with very few exceptions no calculators should be required to solve problems. The author assumes that any student taking physics is capable of punching numbers into a calculator, but it is algebra that ultimately determines the formula that they should be computing. Numbers are used in problems only to illustrate what ``reasonable'' numbers might be for a given real-world physical situation or where the problems cannot reasonably be solved algebraically (e.g. resistance networks).

This layout provides considerable benefits to both instructor and student. This textbook supports a top-down style of learning, where one learns each distinct chapter topic by quickly getting the main points onboard via the summary, then deriving them or exploring them in detail and applying them to example problems, and finally asking the students to use what they have started to learn in highly challenging problems that cannot be solved without a deeper level of understanding than that presented in the text.