Quote:
Originally Posted by narky
I'll check those books out. Will give me something to read until I hopefully start a course next year.
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As mentioned, all of my astro book reviews are on
American amazon. Once you find any amazon book review by me, just click on "madbadgalaxyman"(the reviewer's name), and up comes my
Profile, which lists
all of my reviews.
My primary focus has been to review the sort of astronomy books which are understandable to readers having existing knowledge levels ranging from: a good 'advanced' school mathematics through to people with a year or two of maths and physics at the university level. The readership level of the reviewed astronomy books varies from semi-popular ( 'enthusiast') level through to some of the simpler graduate texts.
There is also a very new popular-level book about the Milky Way by Waller, which is supposed to be quite substantial, but I have not read it.
Amazon are xxxxy, so do shop around, perhaps by using some of the book price search engines on the internet.
cheers, Robert
P.S,
I would like to emphasize, again, that a good comprehensive
review paper about some aspect of astronomy, while "technical" in language and tone, and needing some deciphering of the jargon used, is extremely valuable for
quickly and efficiently generating understanding without too much stress on the reader; these reviews tend to give
results, sparing us the sweat and toil of working out the detailed
derivations of said results.
(for instance, I have most every overview paper that is worth anything, on the subject of the morphologies and properties of normal galaxies)
P.P.S
As I am not currently associated with any university, I have also found it helpful to build up my own personal library of "most every" relevant book on galaxies (and their constituents) that I need to use as a reference work. An expensive pastime, but I now own a better library for supporting astronomical research than any library in Queensland (which also says something about the pathetic nature of university libraries in Qld)