Review by Choice Review
One of the masters of celestial mechanics, together with a very accomplished practitioner, presents the second edition (1st ed., 1979) of this introduction. The information is scrupulously reliable (except for the historical part); the sequence of the presentation appears dictated more by pedagogical than systematic considerations. All chapters--most of them on the two-body problem and its application to spaceflight--are followed by examples and applications as well as problems. The book is thorough and easy to read, since the pace is leisurely and it is not left to the reader to provide many of the derivations of the results. Unexpected, but welcome, is a chapter on planetary exploration. There is a general discussion of the three-body problem, containing some explanation of chaos. Except for the illustrations, in which the foci of ellipses are systematically drawn too far toward the center, this makes a reliable and solid undergraduate introductory work on celestial mechanics, especially for those students who will eventually be working on problems of spacecraft flight and manipulation. Upper-division undergraduates. H. K. Eichhorn University of Florida
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
