The many subtleties of postulates are never spelled out. For example, the Schrödinger equation specialized to the position space is given from the get-go with the motivation that it is the quantum equivalence of Newton's equation of motion, which is true, but not really helpful a child may be familiar with the notion of forces, but not Hamiltonians and complex amplitudes. The formalism is not developed logically, and, overall, the book is very weak in formalism. The author takes the shut-up-and-calculate approach to the extreme (like how standard freshman physics textbooks present QM).
This is not helped by the fact that the book shies away from the math of QM: linear algebra and the concise Dirac notation, which is introduced but quickly discarded. The bad: While a step by step calculation makes it easy to follow, one often gets lost in details and misses the big picture.
For example, Griffiths takes his time to explain standard deviations, separation of variables, and phase and group velocity in the beginning. If you're only getting one QM book, Griffiths is the one, but if you can, check out a few others from your library for when you get stuck between steps.Update (05/15/16): tl dr: I would give this book more stars if it is titled "Introduction to Wave Mechanics."įirst, the good: this book doesn't require mastery of "advanced" classical physics and math such as Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, electromagnetism, partial differential equations, linear algebra, or statistics. Pieces of humor are thrown into the mix, and there are plenty of excercises to keep you busy. You'll do at least a page or two of your own work for each page of his, but in doing so, you'll get an excellent grasp on the subject.
As you go through the text, you'll need to use that paper and pen to work out how he got from one equation to the next, or from one statement to the next the jumps aren't always intuitive, but with some of your own work, you'll get it. The reason the text is relatively thin is because intermediate steps have been left out in equations and reasoning. This text can easily provide a full year of quantum for undergraduates, but you'll need to buy a couple of notebooks and some pens with it. Griffiths gives you all you need to understand introductory quantum mechanics.
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