Dufay - Introduction To Astrophysics

If you are a beginner then it will be a little hard to understand this book. Because this book deals with some advanced physics things so you need to first know about them otherwise you will not enjoy it. But if you are interested in physics and in the laws that governs this universe then go for it ... You will surely enjoy it.

great book

Very useful for me as I am interested in astrophysics. But it is not suitable for a layman

Nice book....to start with....

Great book

I have been the biggest procrastinator of diving into astrophysics, as an enthusiast. I never knew where to start and struggled to find what this book perfectly and effortlessly accomplished, to me... quite literally a great introduction. The book actually surpassed my expectations. I love it.

For anyone interested in stellar astrophysics, this book gives a very thorough theoretical and practical background in a reasonably short space. It's also written in plain English (which is nice) but doesn't shy away from the math. It's a 'crossover' book that tries to be as useful as a text book but as interesting as a popular science book and I think it succeeds, although I will say it never 'tries too hard' like some PopSci books, and it's a very information-heavy read. I personally appreciated the Yerkes Classification section, which I had heard about but was nowhere in my astronomy textbook from school. If you would like to know more about stars and how they work (and how we know how they work), I highly recommend this book. p.s. For a more history-rich overview of the subject, check out A Concise History of Solar and Stellar Physics

After reading a few chapters, I realized this was not the book I wanted, although it was very informative. At least the first few chapters were devoted to technology available at the time the book was written. This book is probably great for an instructor who wants to give an overview of how astrophysicists coped with the information obtained by less sophisticated technology. I can liken this to the transition that took place in the technology employed in the clinical laboratory science between 1925 and the present. Every few years there were advances in lab equipment. Amazing new technologies has replaced the cumbersome flame photometer and single channel chemical analyzers of the 1960s. Automated hematology analyzers have replaced red blood cell count using a microscope and a hemocytometer. Chemistry panels can analyze two or three dozen constituents of the same sample nearly instantaneously once the specimen is sampled. Similar technological advances have taken place in observatories. Sophisticated, computer assisted equipment can do much more with whatever is being observed than could have been done in 1965. The reason the book would be useful to the current astrophysics instructor is to give students understanding of the underlying principles of state-of-the-art equipment. They need to know how they results they get from current equipment was gotten. It will help them to know when something is going wrong and how to troubleshoot. Yes, the book contains many mathematical equations, some of which need to show more minutely how they were derived so the student can understand where the final equations came from. Maybe the author expected readers to know that kind of information prior to reading his book. If this is the case, Dufay did not intend his book to be an introduction to astrophysics any more than Roberts and Caserio meant Basic Principles of Organic Chemistry to be an introduction to organic chemistry. Seeing the reviews on Francis LeBlanc's An Introduction to Stellar Astrophysics, no doubt it would be more useful to me.

Amazing book and information