A General Relativity Workbook

Clear and well organised book

The book's chapters are separated into 9 main topics or sections, if the introduction can be counted as a "topic", these are:Introduction, Flat Spacetime, Tensors, Schwarzschild Black Holes, The Calculus of Curvature, The Einstein Equation, Cosmology, Gravitational Waves, and Spinning Black Holes.These sections are not listed in the Contents, only the names of the chapters are listed there, however the section names and the chapters within each section are listed in the Preface where a very useful flow diagram is given which explains how each of the sections depend on one another. This means you don't necessarily have to read the book linearly, although I did, and the splitting into named sections also helps to keep your focus on what you're trying to achieve when studying the relevant chapters.The author and the publishers, University Science Books, clearly listened to the valid criticism that the book was of little use for self study since it didn't contain any solutions or hints to the exercises - as since 2013 the author has made available an online manual, which is downloadable as a pdf file from the book's web page or the publisher's web site. The manual contains "Hints, Tips and Short Answers to Selected Problems" and so, although no full solutions are given, there are hints to how a particular exercise could be approached and/or the final answer to the exercise. Although full solutions would have been better for those using the book for self study, it would have made the book useless for lecture courses, and so the production of this manual of tips and short answers seems to be a balanced response from the author who genuinely seems to be trying to help those reading the text for self study as much as he's able in the circumstances.

This offers one of the best introductions to General Relativity. What sets this apart is that it is a workbook, leaving blank spaces for the student to complete proofs/examples or/and do exercises that the reader must absolutely must do. I find this to be a very effective way to learn something (provided that you have the skill to fill-in everything that the book asks you to) because it makes sure that the reader is never reading through it passively (reading but not thinking and/or understanding). The only possible drawback is that every once in a while the reader might not be able to complete an important proof, but that depends on the skill and determination of the reader and is to be expected from a workbook so I will not hold this against it (you already know what you are getting into before buying this).A reader can use this for a main book and supplement it with one of the many excellent textbooks on General Relativity (such as Zee's "Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell") for more detailed discussions on the material presented here and also for the rare proof and/or exercise/example that the reader might not find a way to complete.