Like so many colleges and universities these days, this book was assigned as part of a sophomore/junior year long boot camp style physics course and after spending so much time reading and re-reading so many sections of this beast, it's hard to come away feeling bitter about this book.  As other reviewers have pointed out, the real meat of it is found in the 'problems' and exercises.  One thing I should point out, whether you're a student, physics nerd, teacher, or a masochist, YOU WILL (unless you're smarter than Einstein) have moments where you'll want to burn this book and micturate upon the ashes. But, Morin is truly an excellent teacher and even with the limits of teaching physics through a text book, he manages to share with us several tricks and techniques that can only be acquired through years of experience. Some reviewers have commented that this book is condescending and that Morin is a smug writer, standard criticisms that in fact do appear in text books too often, but honestly, I never once felt this from the author's tone or explanations. What these reviewers might be attempting to point out, is that Morin leaves several mathematical steps unexplained, a trait that increases the deeper in the book one reads.  There is a reason for this: it is an expectation that you be fluent enough to keep up with his steps. Why you ask? Because he wants you to be confident in your own skills and not rely on some professor to do all of the work for you.  It also prevents the book from being twice as thick, an excellent practical bonus.<br><br> A few criticisms need to be pointed out.  (One) There are a few chapters, mostly toward the end of the book, where both the qualitative and quantitative explanations  are lacking a great deal. Particularly the general and special relativity sections.  These topics are difficult to master, and both the dialogue and examples are a bit rushed and leave a great deal unexplained.  Because of this, I had to rely greatly on outside sources like wikipedia (thank God for wikipedia) and John Taylor's 'Classical Mechanics', which contains excellent explanations of relativity. (Two) Slightly less important is the amount of math you are required to know for this textbook, which could catch you off guard considering the fact that it's called "Introduction to Classical Mechanics". I was lucky enough to have taken advanced mathematics classes before taking the class that required this text and I would have struggled greatly had that not been the case. Morin also suggests in his introduction that this book could be used by advanced high school students, college freshman, or anyone interested in physics that has taken single-variable calculus, which is extremely misleading unless you are one of the few people on Earth that learned differential equations, vector calculus, and linear algebra in high school, all of which are far beyond single-variable calculus. You will also need to know a decent amount about series (usually introduced in Calc III). But, the upside to all of this is, he does provide excellent appendices for this material, though I would caution against treating these sections as an introduction substitute.<br><br> At the end of the day, if you stick with this text, you will be greatly rewarded with a richer understanding of both math and physics. The mind-numbing, soul-crushing problems will eventually start turning your brain into a very precise laser sharp instrument capable of seeing the world in a different light. I imagine when you've finished this animal, you're mind will feel a lot like Neo after "waking up" from the matrix for the first time.  He asks Morpheus, "I can't go back, can I?". Morpheus replies "No. But if you could, would you really want to?"