Physics:
Power Tools for
Problem Solving
It was the best of books, it was the worst of books.
Well, it may not be "the best" but I think it's pretty good. Physics: Power Tools for Problem Solving was written to serve as a supplementary book for students learning first-year physics. I finished working on it in July 1989 when I moved to Madison, and put it on the web in September 2005. Many of its features will be useful for education, and some are unique to this book, not appearing (as far as I know) anywhere else. Some parts that you may find especially interesting and educationally useful are described in Tips for Exploring and you can see the overall structure in a Table of Contents.
And here are some Tips for Using PDF Files.
But it was "the worst of books" for marketing.
I wrote it for a wide audience, so it could serve as a supplement for any "main
textbook" in any first-year course, taught either with or without calculus.
I think the book achieves this educational goal but it was not practical for
marketing, mainly because the supplement written specifically for a publisher's
own textbook would be "the easy choice" for instructors making decisions
about what books to stock in the bookstore (next to the main textbook) and assign
as required reading.
My wide-audience goal was based on optimistic hopes for
widespread use and large sales. In the marketing
letter that was an appendix to a cover
letter sent to publishers in 1989, I explained that "a
stand-alone supplement has a large potential market. Based on figures
from April 1988's Physics Teacher article by Simon George (and from another
source) the number of students in the non-calculus and calculus classes is about
250,000 + 200,000 = 450,000 students per year in the United States alone, plus
possible international sales. With a good book and good marketing, it
might be possible to gain a part of this market: a 5% share would be 22,500
American students/year." The potential of this large market
interested some publishers in some ways (*), but nothing worked out. {*
Typically, editors were more interested in adapting Physics: Power Tools
to make a specialized supplement for their own textbooks. }
If I had been wise about practical marketing, instead of
writing a generalized book I would have contacted publishers in 1987 to ask
if the authors of their main textbooks would be interested in using some of
my innovative ideas in a collaboration as co-authors. Well, basically
that's what I'm doing now in making this book available on the web.
Physics: Power
Tools for Problem Solving is copyrighted — © 1989 by
Craig Rusbult — with all rights reserved, but I'm making it available
so the ideas in it can be used, and you can use any parts
of it for educational purposes. If you want to use any parts for
commercial purposes, please contact me: craig@chem.wisc.edu
This page is http://www.asa3.org/ASA/education/teach/tools/index.html
and here is the rest of the website:
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