Background: My books were stored while I was away for a year on
sabbatical so that my office could be used by visiting faculty. When I
returned, only about half of my personal library could be found. So I
thought if I was going to replace them with a smaller subset of more
up-to-date references I wanted to start with a list of what people
considered to be “essential” books at the undergrad and grad level,
hence this list.
How the list was generated:
* Suggestions from Phys-L listserve (Thanks all!).
* Lists of physics books found on the web (by various Google searches).
* Listmania lists on Amazon. (Reader reviews were taken into account).
* Texts used in the physics department at Harvard (mainly because I
know someone there who went to the bookstore and sent me names of texts).
* I only included books that appeared at least twice in the above
lists.