Who would it hurt? If a student is willing to spend his/her time and energy until he/she has the right answer they should be given the opportunity to have the 'pleasure of finding things out' (from a title of one of R.Feynman's book). Most of the problems have a number or an expression as an answer, it would've been nice to have the answers in the back. Problems are all do-able and a majority of them interesting once the text is understood (which takes some time and energy). The arguments and estimates made to motivate and justify various things throughout the book were, in my opinion, clear and reasonable. For the more 'everyday' aspects chapter 4 and the thermodynmics parts of my freshman physics textbook were useful in fact, its a good idea to read the thermo part of the freshman physics book while or before reading Ch. The laws of thermodyanmics, especially the 2nd, are clearely illustrated in fair amounts 'theoretical' detail. The tone of the writing is nice also you wiil NOT find the unnecessary 'of course' and 'obvious' sprinkled throughout, which were are a common occurrence in more annoying texts. But in this book understanding actually happens because, unlike most books, the whole book is written intuitively. Like in all physics books, it is expected that you understand the preceding text before you gain ability to do a problem 'quickly'. This is one the best physics book I've seen. This is also something I like and I know that I'll keep it at my side when I take a stat mech class since I found most of those books to be equation after equation with minimal discussion. However quickly browsing through the later sections it seems to me that it is more conceptual based then equation deriving. We only used the first five chapters in our course so I can't speak for the stat mech section. I do agree that it would be nice if the exercises had answers but luckily a lot of them aren't that hard and you can normally work out the answer yourself.
I really like the style he writes the book in and is a very easy read. This is something I prefer in an introductory book since I'm more concerned about gaining a solid basis of the topics theoretically and can easily fill in the mathematics later. In my opinion this book stands out because it has a lot more conceptual stuff as opposed to equations after equation as in, say, Kittel. This is the best introduction to thermal physics books I've been able to find.
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