Extensively annotated notes on Foster & Nightengale's text "A Short Course in General Relativity" as well as my own development of numerous related concepts.

The Book Notes file is more like an instructor's manual than classroom notes since I try to fill in (for my own understanding) the many, many (intentionally) missing details that allowed the authors to keep their book compact and focused on the issues.

I have also extracted four or five topics that I present substantially differently from the book's approach, and I have included these as stand-alone files. In several cases these files consolidate material scattered across several chapters and appendices of the book. These topics are also interwoven into my book notes

One topic of note is presentation of both the general Lorentz transformation matrix and the general homogeneous Lorentz transformation matrix, neither of which are included in the text book. Strangely, these matrices are much simpler and easier to understand and visualize than the specialized Lorentz transformation based upon an inertial frame moving in the x-direction, which is all that this book and many other present. Also, I have not found the homogeneous matrix mentioned elsewhere (I am sure it must be) and I show how it can be used to simplify certain developments like the doppler formula for waves that are normally carried out with the more complex full matrix. I also show that the homogeneous Lorentz transformation matrix is simply the Jacobian matrix, which makes it is very easy to apply to equations.

I found this text book to be the only one that I could read by myself to learn GR. I previously tried to read a number of other texts over a period of years, but they all assumed too many facts and used mathematical notation that I didn't understand. This book very, very clearly lays out the fundamentals. I highly recommend it as an introductory text.