Carbineman,
If you are interested in ballistics on a technical level, you can do worse than starting with Brian Litz's book, Applied Ballistics for Long Range Shooting. It comes with a disk with a good point mass ballistics solver in it, and tables of many of the most commonly available match bullets (and others) with actual measured ballistic coefficients rather than the often slightly optimistic numbers published by some makers.
If you have a more professional level of interest in exterior ballistics and have a strong math background in calculus and differential equations, the modern classic (don't you just love a good oxymoron) is Modern Exterior Ballistics, by the late Robert L. McCoy. The first edition had a number of errata that Don Miller and other students of McCoy's have corrected for the second edition now available.
If you are just looking for straight shooting on applied service rifle competition techniques, Jim Owens's material is a good place to go.
If you are interested in interior ballistics (what happens inside the gun up until the bullet exits), you can do a lot worse than to purchase the QuickLOAD software and read its manual and fiddle with the various arguments and watch their effect on the output graphs and tables. It becomes an education over time.
If you are interested in ballistics on a technical level, you can do worse than starting with Brian Litz's book, Applied Ballistics for Long Range Shooting. It comes with a disk with a good point mass ballistics solver in it, and tables of many of the most commonly available match bullets (and others) with actual measured ballistic coefficients rather than the often slightly optimistic numbers published by some makers.
If you have a more professional level of interest in exterior ballistics and have a strong math background in calculus and differential equations, the modern classic (don't you just love a good oxymoron) is Modern Exterior Ballistics, by the late Robert L. McCoy. The first edition had a number of errata that Don Miller and other students of McCoy's have corrected for the second edition now available.
If you are just looking for straight shooting on applied service rifle competition techniques, Jim Owens's material is a good place to go.
If you are interested in interior ballistics (what happens inside the gun up until the bullet exits), you can do a lot worse than to purchase the QuickLOAD software and read its manual and fiddle with the various arguments and watch their effect on the output graphs and tables. It becomes an education over time.