Before You Begin
Popular Books on Physics
When you're solving problems, working through textbooks, and getting into the nitty-gritty details of each topic, it's so easy to lose the forest for the trees and forget why you even became inspired to study physics in the first place. This is where really, really good (and non-speculative) popular books on physics come in handy: they inspire, they encourage, and they help you keep the big picture in mind.
One big problem is that many popular physics books (especially those written by famous physicists) are incredibly speculative and tend to present an unrealistic view of what the study of physics is all about. When you're learning physics, it's best to avoid these types of speculative books and stick to the ones that talk about the real physics that we know exists (in general, anything by Frank Close or Richard Feynman is a safe bet!).
Here are a handful of my favorite popular physics books, ranked in order of difficulty:
Mathematical and Scientific Preliminaries
Before you begin studying physics and working through the topics in the sections below, you need to be familiar with some basic mathematics. A high school education — which should include pre-algebra, algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, trigonometry, and pre-calculus — is sufficient. If you need a refresher, I recommend either working through the Khan Academy math courses (https://www.khanacademy.org/) or the book Why Math? by R.D. Driver. There's no need to be familiar with calculus before starting, because you’ll learn it as you work through the undergraduate-level courses.
There are no scientific prerequisites for this curriculum. You don’t need to be familiar with biology or chemistry at either the high school or college level in order to understand, although doing some studying on the side can’t hurt. Khan Academy has some great high school science refresher courses that are perfect for this (https://www.khanacademy.org/science).
How to Study
Everyone learns very differently, and knowing your learning style is important: do you learn by reading, by taking notes, by talking, by watching, by doing, or by a combination of some or all of these? For example, I learn by reading and by note-taking, so I read through textbooks very carefully, take copious notes, and summarize each concept in my own words before moving on to something new. Think about this before you begin so that you'll know how to structure your studies.
Regardless of your learning style, you'll still need to solve the physics problems in each textbook. Solving problems is the only way to understand physics. There's no way around it. Even though it can feel tedious at times, there's nothing more rewarding than figuring out a really difficult physics problem and realizing that you figured it all out all by yourself!
One tough thing about learning on your own is that you may not know whether you are solving the problems correctly. Some of the textbooks listed below have answers to selected exercises in the back of the book, but these aren’t always adequate for two reasons: (1) they often only show the solutions to the problems, and not the steps taken to get there; and (2) it’s much better to do all of the exercises rather than just a select few. The good news is that many of the solutions (and step-by-step ways to solve them) can be found online with a simple Google search. If you are going to Google the answers, however, please first try to solve the problems on your own, and try multiple times (you’re not in school trying to get a perfect grade — you’re trying to learn and understand).
And, finally, a note on learning in a laboratory vs. learning from textbooks. Physics is both an experimental and theoretical science, and while research happens in laboratories and on blackboards and computers, the majority of any physics education does not take place in a laboratory but in lecture classes that teach from textbooks and assign homework problems that are found in textbooks. Yes, there are some laboratory classes (usually at the very introductory levels, and their only purpose is to show that oh, look, Newton’s laws work in the real world after all) and some — some — undergraduates are allowed to participate in research on the side, but physics is taught through textbooks, lectures, and homework problems. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the undergraduate physics curriculum at any university that offers a physics major. Graduate programs in physics are largely the same — both M.A. and PhD programs in physics require two years of core classes — with one key difference: to get a PhD, students need to complete several years of research, a thesis, and — at many programs — take an exam to prove they have mastered the graduate core curriculum. The graduate core curriculum is all textbooks and lectures and homework problems. The textbooks listed in the curriculum I’ve written below are the same textbooks that are used in the top undergraduate and graduate physics programs in the world. Studying them will give you the same education that you would receive at one of these programs — no painfully-annoying-introductory-mechanics-laboratory-class-with-inane-group-projects required.