I bought this book to try to get a better understanding of descriptive wave equations, resonance, and some really simple modeling of oscillating physical systems. It's done its job well! Fairly easy to read, loads of challenging chapter-end questions. The style of the writing (done in the 60's) is pretty awkward.. laid-back mannerisms sidled up against some haughty, pretentious verbiage; this can be distracting or entertaining, depending on your mood. I found it entertaining :)
January 06, 2009

Wonderfully lucid. I should have read this book long ago.

Short Review:
The photos and plots in this book are exemplary. They complement the material perfectly, building up intuitional understanding of the phenomena at the same time the text allows you to handle the physics mathematically.
Each chapter follows logically. Everything builds up step by step from the most basic case of a simple harmonic oscillator, and the book has a feeling of progression that encouraged me to keep going. Every chapter brought new understanding to things I vaguely knew about, but was fuzzy on quite why it was that way.
Although the basic systems discussed are pendulums, masses-on-springs, and linear strings, the text also contains plenty of information on how the theory built by examining these simple systems can apply to many other places where the same differential equations apply - especially electric circuits, but also acoustics.
Vibrations and Waves does a superb job as a concise and clear introduction to how wave phenomena work.

Longer Review:
I recently read this book as review while preparing for a more advanced class on quantum mechanics (a theory about waves). I had previously taken a course on vibrations and waves using the (out of print) text by Crawford. Although Crawford's book is probably good, I never read the text carefully though because it was monstrously long.

French presented itself as friendly and readable, without bogging me down in unnecessary detail. It turned out to be exactly that. The chapters were short enough I could read them in one sitting. The problems varied from straightforward applications of what was already stated in the text to ones that made me think for a while, without being so overbearing as to waste my time or become unduly frustrating. There are also answers printed in the back of the book - in my opinion absolutely essential for any book to be used for self-study.

I actually enjoyed reading Vibrations and Waves, which is not the norm for reading physics texts, at least for me. The photos were gorgeous. They were black and white, and not fancy, but the experimental setup used to get the photos was often both clever and instructive. Just when it got difficult to understand just what the equations were saying, there was a picture to demonstrate the system's response. The Lissajous figures and pictures of nodal lines of 2-D surfaces were interesting enough to be worth looking at in their own right.

After reading this book, I feel like I have a much firmer understanding of coupled oscillators and coupled differential equations, the wave equation, refraction, diffraction, and other boundary effects, which were all things I knew enough about to be able to describe, roughly, but not enough about to claim a useful comprehension of the subject.
The introduction of complex numbers and the complex exponential is truly masterful.

I would like to have the time to read French's other introductory physics books, but even if I don't I'll remain glad to have read this one.
July 31, 2007

As a Student

I recently took a class on Vibrations and Waves and the professor ended up using this book mainly for the course. It was somewhat difficult to read through and the material in the book often has little to do with the actual practice problems. Also, there are no examples and many of the chapters refuse to go into important detail of some topics, assuming the reader to know a good deal.
January 04, 2007

If only every textbook was this good...

I used this book instead of the originally assigned text (H.J. Pain's truly awful "Physics of Vibrations and Waves") in a class I took recently. It was a pleasure to read.

In spite of the fact that the book is quite short (and quite compact in your bag), it covers the material very thoroughly. The author writes clearly and with a lot of attention to the needs of the student. French's style is also very lively and makes you want to read on instead of feeling you are obligated to. The problems at the end of each chapter are excellent. It is also inexpensive.

All in all, quite a gem in this day of boring, incomprehensible, too-heavy-to-carry $120 textbooks that arrive in a "new" less readable edition every year. If only every textbook could be like this.

It isn't quite perfect -- every once in a while a derivation gets obscure and a few topics aren't covered -- but it is very, very good. I highly recommend it.
December 02, 2006

Very nice book on the subject

This is a terrific book. It would benefit slightly from incorporating matrices in one part of the text, but given the level of student it's geared toward, that's not a fatal omission. French's style is clear and thorough. I am a fan of all his books, and have no qualms recommending this one.
May 25, 2006

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Electromagnetic Vibrations, Waves, and Radiation
by George Bekefi, Alan H. Barrett

Special Relativity (M.I.T. Introductory Physics Series)
by A. P. French

Newtonian Mechanics (M.I.T. Introductory Physics Series)
by A. P. French

Introduction to Quantum Physics (M.I.T. Introductory Physics Series)
by A. P. French, Edwin F. Taylor

Div, Grad, Curl, and All That: An Informal Text on Vector Calculus, Fourth Edition
by H. M Schey