This should help with your college, learning experience.

This book is a must have for any student enrolled in University Physics. The solutions contained within are useful, and are applicable to the world around us.

I'm using this book for my first college physics course. I find the text very dry and boring, and the problems at the end of each chapter are confusing and not well explained. For example, I'm doing my homework and one of the problems is "speculate on how gaseous diffusion works." Just that, does not explain what gaseous diffusion is. As with many of the problems in this book, the first thing that comes into my mind is "what the hell are you talking about??" Another question asks me to compare the length of something to "the diameter of a molecule." Huh? What molecule? Are all molecules the same diameter? And how the heck am I supposed to know what that diameter is? Gah. I do not recommend this book unless you like being confused.

Also, the discussion questions at the end of each chapter are very nice, but the answers are not provided anywhere. So how are you supposed to know if you answered them correctly? And another thing I really hate about this book, it will say "and why do you think this happens?" and then not tell you why. About 90% of the time my answer is "I have no clue why that happened." :/ This book makes me hate physics.

I've used both this book and Halliday's Extended 6th edition for my course on Physics. My conclusion, chapter after chapter, has been clear to me: this is the perfect book for a general course on Physics at university level. The language is simple to understand (Halliday too), the figures and tables are well done and useful (Halliday too), the content is thorough (Halliday: not so much !). Yes, this last is the striking thing: it's thorough and reaches a level of detail that is not a common feature for these kind of Physics books.
The problems set is well balanced both in content and number (an average of 85-90 for each chapter), and as usual odd-numbered problems' solutions are provided.
I've tried this book without anybody advising it to me, now I'm happy I've had it for the exam.

If I had to sum up this textbook in three words, it would be "easy to understand". The writing style is pretty informal when compared to most textbooks, but yet, this informality does NOT compromise on the depth of the explanations.

It is one of the main physics textbooks used for intro classes across the US, and though I've never read any other intro physics books besides this one, I'm not surprised to see on many university's intro physics courses web pages that THIS is the book that is used.

Unlike most textbooks that I've had to read, I can't really think of any complaints with this one. This doesn't mean that this book is perfect, but looking back, I really can't think of any major (or minor for that matter) problems I had with the book. I relied on this book instead of lectures to learn the material, so it isn't that I had a great physics teacher that helped me explain the material.

The text is a bit confusing, but reading the figures and summaries helps a lot. Some of the problems aren't covered in the book, so you're going to have to get some help for the harder problems

Little background. I'm a trucker in the summer, and a short order cook in the winter. I loved this book. I first bought a used copy of the fourth edition, and after a few years I have purchased the 10th edition with the modern physics. That stuff I still have trouble with.
I got these cause I had a ton of questions about how stuff works. And they break it down. I had done well in Physics before, but this was a whole new ball game. The mathematics is not explained especially well, but the physics behind it is. And once you understand that, the math comes.
For those of you who knock this book, well, they must be doing something right, cause 1) their on the 10th edition. and (2) They were able to reach a shmoe like me.

Everyone says War and Peace is a great classic, but not everyone wants to read it, and few actually did.

For physics majors and honors students, this is a wonderfully rich and thorough text, teach them the "right stuff" from the start. My students have had only good things to say about it. It doesn't shy away from complicated math when it is necessary. A good example of that is in the chapter on gravitation, the potential due to a spherical shell of mass is fully worked out by integration: ~1/r outside the shell and constant inside. This is an important result that gets used repeatedly, e.g., later in electrostatics. Every book tells the readers about the inverse-square force law between two point objects, but few explain how to go from points to spheres, or why spheres may be regarded as points sometimes. Some texts dodge the issue completely, others state the result and not explain it. As a result, it is common to see students get the wrong idea that whatever formulas that are good for point objects are good for spherical objects, because they plugged the numbers into the formulas and got the right answers! That's exactly not what we like to see in physics. With this book, even if the students are not ready to do the math, they at least know the difference and the explanation is there for them to read when they are ready.

The exercises and problems in this text are real gems. There are numerous real-life applications of basic physics. Some are like mini research reports. These are enriching and stimuating for the physics loving students. They get to see the difference between doing science versus doing contrived mathematical excercises. I have a colleague X who once remarked to me that another colleague Y assigned some really interesting problems to his students that he had never seen. We later discovered the secret: Y got most of his problems from this text!

In sum, this is a more advanced introductory text that has the right stuff. If you're enthusiastic about physics, it's highly recommended.