This is one of the Schaum's guides that is really just a problems repository. It does not have much in the way of explanatory material designed to teach you the subject. It is meant to be used in conjunction with a textbook so you can get the explanation of the subject from the book and then come to this for problems. One very helpful thing is that it classifies the problems into categories. Some problems are meant to be very basic examples, much like you will see in the chapter text that are pretty easy and only take one or two steps to solve. Then the book will give homework problems that are divided into problems for everyone (basically problems you would see in algebra-based physics) and calculus-based homework problems. It also suggests problems to select for exams (easy, hard, or calculus-based) for each chapter and to use for a final exam.
My one issue with the book is that there are not many of what I refer to as "compound problems". By that, I mean problems that have 6-7 steps that you have to solve, and you generally use the solution to one step to solve for one of the other steps and so on. In many calculus-based physics classes, calculus is used to derive the formulas, but on the exams, you just use algebra to solve compound problems. If I remember correctly, between the 8 exams I had in two semesters of calculus-based physics, we only had two or three problems that required using calculus in the exams. Obviously, this can vary from teacher to teacher, but because the problems that use calculus take so long to solve, on exams many teachers use problems that have multiple parts but you just use algebra to solve the problems. So, if you have a teacher who does that, this is likely to be more helpful to you on homework problems (where you generally will have to use calculus more) but may not be as helpful mimicking your exam problems. So, with those provisos, I definitely think it is one of the more helpful supplements out there and does give a good breakdown of the solutions so you actually learn how to solve the problems.
My one issue with the book is that there are not many of what I refer to as "compound problems". By that, I mean problems that have 6-7 steps that you have to solve, and you generally use the solution to one step to solve for one of the other steps and so on. In many calculus-based physics classes, calculus is used to derive the formulas, but on the exams, you just use algebra to solve compound problems. If I remember correctly, between the 8 exams I had in two semesters of calculus-based physics, we only had two or three problems that required using calculus in the exams. Obviously, this can vary from teacher to teacher, but because the problems that use calculus take so long to solve, on exams many teachers use problems that have multiple parts but you just use algebra to solve the problems. So, if you have a teacher who does that, this is likely to be more helpful to you on homework problems (where you generally will have to use calculus more) but may not be as helpful mimicking your exam problems. So, with those provisos, I definitely think it is one of the more helpful supplements out there and does give a good breakdown of the solutions so you actually learn how to solve the problems.
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