Reviews for John Macmurray Community beyond Political Philosophy

The average rating for John Macmurray Community beyond Political Philosophy based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-04-13 00:00:00 Sebastian Solarez tomorrow i have a test so i am reading it.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-12 00:00:00 Brian Borrero This is a book on the fundamentals and applications of complex analysis intended for those in the physical sciences or engineering. While it does demonstrate the truth of the big theorems of the field, it avoids the plethora of theorems, lemmas, and definitions that you would find in a more rigorous treatment. This suited me just fine as I used this book in a graduate level complex analysis course for engineers. The topics covered in the book include: standard functions on complex numbers, analyticity of complex functions, poles and singularities, contour integration and the residue theorem, calculating residues, series expansions, evaluating real integrals using contour integration, multivalued functions and Riemann sheets, and conformal mapping. The book also covers dispersion relations and analytic continuation, though we didn't cover those topics in my class. The two most important sections of the book that the other sections build up to are the evaluation of certain real integrals that couldn't be evaluated otherwise using contour integration and solving Laplace's equation for complicated geometries using conformal mapping. My biggest complaints with the book: The typesetting and graphics The author states in the preface that the book was prepared using Microsoft Word, and it shows. For example, the "ln" of the natural logarithm is printed in italics instead of in roman type as is the standard practice. When I started the book I was confused about what these l and n variables meant, because italic letters always represent variables, not functions! The author and publisher would be well served to put down some money to get the book written up in LaTeX. The quality of the graphics is poor in places as well. Some figures have low resolution, like they were blown up too much. Others have portions that are blanked out or elements (like the head of an arrow) that are shifted from where they are supposed to be. Editing There are regular typos throughout the book. They don't affect the understanding of the material, but are still annoying. Applications For a book with "Applications" in its title, it was surprisingly light on applications and applied examples. The section with the most direct applicability was on conformal mapping, but even there all the examples deal with electrostatics. I would have liked examples from more disciplines, like temperature or fluid flow. One other thing to be aware of is that the author often skips showing intermediate steps when getting to a result. This is not a problem as a graduate level text doesn't need to hold your hand through every step, but be aware that you will have to pause and work some things out yourself at times if you want to have a complete understanding of how a result is reached. Overall, the book gets the job done for what it is intended, though in an inelegant and at times sloppy way. As such, I give it three stars.