At first, I thought about editing my previous post, but since it's longer than that one… After revisiting the texts from the Theoretical Minimum, I found this bit from a Classical Mechanics preface as a rather apt summary of the series: IMHO the authors accomplished their job. In the series so far you have gateways to branches of physics you could expand on through other books: Classical Mechanics by J.R. Taylor Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by D. J. Griffiths (of Introduction to Electrodynamics fame) Principles of Quantum Mechanics by R. Shankar Diagrammatica: The Path to Feynman Diagrams by M. Veltman (quantum field theory in a nutshell, which also happens to be a title of a different textbook that's intended for newcomers :P) Gravitation and Cosmology: principles and applications of the general theory of relativity by S. Weinberg (disputable choice, but I liked the fact that a lot of the calculations were explicit. Starts with a differential geometry refresher, which may or may not be enough) Most of those are either from my undergrad courses or ones that I picked up at random at the library and liked a lot.What became clear after a couple of quarters is that the students were not completely satisfied with the layperson’s courses I was teaching. They wanted more than the Scientific American experience. A lot of them had a bit of background, a bit of physics, a rusty but not dead knowledge of calculus, and some experience at solving technical problems. They were ready to try their hand at learning the real thing—with equations. The result was a sequence of courses intended to bring these students to the forefront of modern physics and cosmology.