The REA problem-solvers guides give you a lot of example problems on all of the major topics you will come across in the first year of physics. It does cover some of the more advanced material that you would come across in a Modern Physics class including Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, but I just took the first two semesters of physics which covers Newtonian Mechanics, Optics, Waves, Electricity, Magnetism, and Thermodynamics. The book definitely has a lot of examples covering those subjects, but I am not sure how extensive it gets into the higher-level concepts.
The guide does lay out some of the theory, but it generally confines that to a few pages and then gets into the example problems. It works out the examples in a lot of detail, and it gives you strategies for how to solve the various problem types. The two cons that I noticed when using this is that the diagrams are pretty basic. It definitely does not give the kind of higher-quality drawings that the textbooks will give you, but they do provide you with enough detail on how to attack the problem. Second, the solutions do, at times, skip steps. Usually, they are things that you should know how to do by the time you are taking physics, but sometimes it can be hard to figure out how they got from one point to the next. The guide also has a wide range of problem types, both the "easier" problems that you will get in algebra-based physics and the more complex problems that you get in calculus-based physics. And, it does go over calculus concepts like the dot product and cross product that you will need to solve some problems that actually use calculus. So, it will be helpful no matter what version of physics you are taking.
The guide does lay out some of the theory, but it generally confines that to a few pages and then gets into the example problems. It works out the examples in a lot of detail, and it gives you strategies for how to solve the various problem types. The two cons that I noticed when using this is that the diagrams are pretty basic. It definitely does not give the kind of higher-quality drawings that the textbooks will give you, but they do provide you with enough detail on how to attack the problem. Second, the solutions do, at times, skip steps. Usually, they are things that you should know how to do by the time you are taking physics, but sometimes it can be hard to figure out how they got from one point to the next. The guide also has a wide range of problem types, both the "easier" problems that you will get in algebra-based physics and the more complex problems that you get in calculus-based physics. And, it does go over calculus concepts like the dot product and cross product that you will need to solve some problems that actually use calculus. So, it will be helpful no matter what version of physics you are taking.
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