If you're up for a real wild ride and have some time to kill (no, seriously - the thing is over 1000 pages), Roger Penrose's The Road To Reality (http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/d...) actually covers this stuff in a reasonably accessible way.
I can't say how it would read to a newbie, but ostensibly he wrote that book to be aimed more at the smart but uninitiated pop-sci audience than the practicing physicists. I'm not sure he hit his mark, quite, but when I was a second year physics undergrad I found it pretty easy to get through at least the first half (though I had worked through MTW's Gravitation first, so I wasn't totally new to the material - also an excellent book, if you've got months to spend on it and some more lightweight general relativity books to look at as supplements).
It probably depends, though - when you say "newbie", do you mean "F=MA means nothing to me and I barely passed single variable calculus", or "I got straight A's in vector calculus and excelled at freshman physics through basic quantum mechanics but never took more"? If it's the former, you'll want to grab Feynman's freshman lectures first, they'll get you thinking right about this stuff if you make it through them, and later you can start to worry about stuff like tensor calculus...
Unless you and bugsbunnyak are in cahoots somehow - unlikely - that's two completely independent recommendations for The Road To Reality within 5 minutes, on HN. That's enough for me. Grabbing it. Thanks.
Not in cahoots at all, it really is a very interesting book. One of the most...different, I guess is the word, math/physics books I've read in quite a while.
Be warned, it might not be the best book for beginners, and in all honesty it's more a math book than a physics one, but if you feel at least somewhat math-competent, it's worth a read. At least I enjoyed it a lot.
As a professional programmer, I often feel as if I should be more on top of maths than I feel I am. Maybe this book is above my level. Only one way to find out!
Roger Penrose's "Road to Reality" is great for an overview in one not-so-compact book. It's a bit hand-wavy, admittedly. The neophyte problem, and reason we have universities, is that "you don't know what you don't know." Penrose's book and t'Hooft's curriculum get you some part of the way to knowing what you need to know.
One more option is Lev Landau's series. They're dense but fairly readable for graduate-level tracts.
