I've been learning some physics, spending more and more time with Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's 1973 book on general relativity. Its no-nonsense title is Gravitation.
It's hard for me to look my copy without having words like "gigantic," "imposing," or "heavyweight" come to mind. It's got to be the Muhammad Ali of General Relativity books. Gravitation weighs in at 1,272 pages and has the same height, weight, and reach as a large city's Yellow Pages telephone directory. One could expect a loud thud were it ever to be dropped to the canvas by some future, new and improved theory of gravitation. It also seemed well beyond my possible comprehension when I first peeked into it, relying as it does on the "modern" language of differential forms and a geometric treatment of tensors.
But I wouldn't recommend Gravitation as a book to learn general relativity from. Instead, there is this excellent book by Bernard F. Schutz, which is much more to my liking.
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