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that inspired me to consider anew the different viewpoints we have
of textbooks as teachers than we had of them when we were students.
(I realize that some of us were students back in the Mesozoic era, so
our memories may be cloudy and/or be of texts long out of date. But
anyway ... )
I'm assuming that the "Reif" referred to in Leigh's comment (in
the context of a thermodynamics discussion) is F. Reif's _Statistical
and Thermal Physics_, a text I remember having in my junior-year stat
mech course. As a student, I HATED the book. Despised it. Loathed
it. It was opaque, unintelligible, and provided (to us students,
anyway) virtually no conceptual 'hooks' on which to hang the
mathematical details. I learned more about the _ideas_ of thermo (not
the formalism) from a friendly grad student than I did from that book.
<snip>
I _still_ hate thermo after all these years ...