An essential undergraduate text
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Most physics degree courses don't cover the topic of Statistical Mechanics until some way through the second year and this is mostly due to students requiring a reasonable grounding in thermodynamics, which is traditionally a 2nd year topic. Statistical Mechanics: A Survival Guide is an excellent book for any student studying this subject as it starts off by explaining the basics of statistics in such a manner that is very easy to understand. The foundations that it sets in the first chapter ensure that you have a very clear understanding of these basics, which are extremely important for grasping the idea of a microstate, essential to deriving the distribution functions for the various types of particle. It gives very complete discussions on quantum statistics and its applications along with the standard sections on ideal gases. The links between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics are frequently highlighted so as to show how the two subjects go hand in hand. This is an excellent text on a subject that can become very complicated and the presentation and explanations in the book cannot be faulted.
My only quibble is the price - I would have expected just a little bit more for my money but nonetheless I still consider it an essential book for a physics student to have on their shelf.
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