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Comment by martincmartin | Hacker News Reader

What other textbooks would you suggest?

As mentioned in a footnote in the blog post, I think Gelfand and Fomin’s “Calculus of Variations” is very clear on its topic. Wald's "General Relativity" is slow-going, but excellent. No good textbooks on quantum mechanics or QFT exist; Weinberg's "Quantum Theory of Fields" is probably the least terrible on that. Nielsen and Chuang's "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" is still excellent, but pretty out-of-date.

Also, to be clear, I haven't worked through most of Sussman, so I can't recommend it one way or the other. I was just commenting on the handling of the Legendre transform.

I would recommend Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur by Lancaster and Blundell. It has many clear worked examples and builds up lots of the conceptual and technical ideas in a way that felt comfortable. Also the chapters are quite short and are digestible in one sitting.

> No good textbooks on quantum mechanics or QFT exist

No love for Cohen-Tannoudji?

Haven't read it, but based on the table of contents it looks like it has at least two of the very common problems with QM books: (1) starts with continuous degrees of freedom rather than qubits, and (2) talks about observables rather than PVMs. This isn't surprising since much of what's wrong with how QM is taught has been illuminated by the young field of quantum information, which hardly existed when the book was published in 1992.

For me talking more about the second point, see here: http://blog.jessriedel.com/2016/11/12/how-to-think-about-qua...

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