My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part Three

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Deadlines and exams make you do wonders. I really worked through this book in two full nights. You just need to focus really hard and deadlines help you do that. I was familiar with the material before but needed a refresh. There are not that many proofs and the book dimensions are small. There is not that much text per page. Totally doable. Good intro book.

Unless you already know the material it will require a week or more. The book is very discoursive and clear, there are plenty of exercises and examples (which I assume the author of the list didn't do). I haven't proceeded past page 30 as I'm currently learning high school mathematics and I'm not yet comfortable with integrals and the notation but I think it's a book you could easily digest once you've gotten the prerequisites.

This book is also available in the public domain from Project Gutenberg Australia:

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1305021p.pdf

I had a quick skim of the Project Gutenberg link another poster gave. I wouldn't recommend this book if you are looking for a modern understanding(from within the past 50 years), as it only covers classical thermodynamics, and not statistical mechanics. This book feels like it's over a century old, and while classical thermodynamics may seem simple and pure, it's not at all how scientists in the past 50 yrs would think about, model, or analyse such systems and processes.

It's really ironic that it's authored by Fermi but doesn't touch on quantum mechanical distributions, for example his own Fermi-Dirac distribution for ensembles of fermions such as electrons in a metal.

Modern approaches typically derive the thermodynamic laws from the underlying statistical properties of large system sizes. And are much more powerful since you can handle variances and higher moments beyond just the mean. And also let you apply quantum mechanics and to see how Fermions differ from Bosons, and derive cool things like the Blackbody spectrum, or Fermi energy of an electron gas.

Decent books are Reif, Kittel & Kroemer (we've used both these at undergrad level classes), or Landau Lifshitz volume 5, and one by Feynmann at the grad level.

Disclaimer - I TA'd stat mech / thermo four times during my PhD.

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