Stellar Interiors: Physical Principles, Structure, and Evolution (Astronomy and Astrophysics Library)

This book is one of the best books I have had in my science academic career. Unlike a lot of books, the authors do not employee the "It can be easily seen" mentality, and actually show every step in their derivations.The order in which the material is introduced is clear, and easy to follow. They do a great job of explaining all the notation and clarifying what steps they take.My only complaint is that there are a number of equations that are wrong in the book. Not a LOT, but a handful. I assume most are just typos, and I have never come across a textbook with 0 mistakes. I won't get into them here, but if anyone wants the ones that I have noticed, feel free to contact me.

This is an excellent book on stellar astrophysics. It is comprehensive and detailed. The authorsknow their material very well, and are able to present, discuss, and explain it concisely.I knew a fair amount about stellar astrophysics before reading this book, but I certainly know morenow.The book has a little of the flavour of Chandrasekhar's work on stellar structure, to its benefit(Chandrasekhar's book itself is grievously obsolete). Some of this influence is shown in the section onStellar Modelling, with its lengthy discussion of polytropes, and the Eddington standard model.That section on stellar modelling is an excellent feature, as it is not something which necessarily findsits way into books on stellar structure.One matter, however. The advertised CD-ROM is not included. My copy was printed late in 2010. The materialcan be found at [...]. Neither the ISBN-10 (from the book) nor the ISBN-13 (available here at Amazon)worked, but browsing by year I found it. Shockingly, the ATMOS section and the EVOLUTION section have onlyWindows executables, though there is a link in one section to what is described as modern Unix code.Really, functional Fortran code is the icing on the cake, the cake being a very fine book on stellar astrophysics.

Please be aware that the binding on this book seems to be poorly done. My first copy broke the second time I opened it (the front cover came off). Amazon replaced it. The second copy is quite stiff, and I don't think it will last long.