[contact_fusion]

Feynman lectures are excellent for physical intuition but if someone doesn't have a few years of practice with physics it will be difficult to get much out of it. Feynman also doesn't have a lot in the way of problem solving, even with the companion problem solving book.

With that in mind, Landau/Lifshitz is an entirely different class. I'm a practicing astrophysical theorist and I would never claim to have grokked these volumes in anything nearing completeness. A serious post-PhD program of study can be undertaken to understand to the finer points of those books; this is a pursuit that would challenge any practitioner. (I place Physics of Shock Waves and High Temperature Hydrodynamic Phenomena by Zel'dovich and Razier in the same category of extremely information dense Soviet tracts on physics.) They are incredibly valuable, although I do think there is a bit of an element of "if you don't know L/L, you aren't a real theorist."

I think that recommending these texts is great for someone down the road, but if someone hasn't even had a full year of intro physics recommending these is not appropriate. Intro-level textbooks exist for a reason - not all of them are cheap, watered down versions of the "real stuff." (Some are, of course.) There are also some texts I've found (but don't remember, unfortunately) in the computer vision community that introduce some physics that would be great for someone with a computer science/engineering background.

edit: "cheap" as in "cheap feeling" not inexpensive, as most of those intro texts are more expensive than the graduate level

[mhh__]

The first L&L book is what I'm thinking of: It's actually pretty manageable. I'm talking out of my ass beyond here in the series, I don't have any others in physical form so I've read bits of QM and The classical theory of fields

The downside to them is that they don't come into contact with the "mathematical" physics side e.g. Treatment of Lagrangian/Hamiltonian formalism through differential geometry.