Just Plain Mean
According to some other reviews this text makes an excellent reference for professionals. However, they've already taken the tests, and been through the classes. In short they already have their Phd. If you know the majority of readers of your book are coming to you to improve their understanding or learn entirely new material, why would you make difficult stuff even harder by intentionally omitting derivation steps in every section of every chapter. With the deadlines and time constraints associated with student life it's almost impossible to get through all the difficult derivations in the reading before even getting to the sometimes insane problems in a reasonable time. Either try to make the reading as clear as possible, and the problems challenging, or reduce the difficulty of the problems and have the reading challenging like it is now, but don't challenge the usually involuntary student readers with both difficulties. I may change my opinion later, but for now I feel that the level of difficulty and style of this text is based largely on the cruelty of the author.
Challenging masterpiece
Excellent masterpiece of the subject. Surely not a "Electrodynamics for dummies" book, but a good reference for graduated students and experts. The exercises are quite hard, but... that's physics!
The emperor is naked
This is terrible textbook. Jackson has no idea how to present material so that you can use it to solve real world problems. He should be covered in sackcloth and ashes.
Dr Val
canon
If you are a physics graduate student, you probably will encounter this book at some point. Everyone tries to pidgeonhole it: space physicist want it to focus on plasma physics, string theorists want it to focus more on field theory, etc. When you take average focus of so many disparate groups of physicists, you get the book that has actually been written! Even for a such a specialize audience. Jackson is as general as possible. I commend him for it!
Jackson is not a pedagogical text.
Jackson's book is the gold standard, bar none, for *reference* textbooks on E&M. That's why you will find at least one copy in the office of every physics professor and most physics grad students in the English-speaking world. It is not and was clearly never intended to be a pedagogical device, however, so pray to your deity of choice that you have an outstanding teacher to guide you through it. You can't really call yourself a physicist unless you've slogged through it in a grad E&M class, because everybody else before you did it too. Good luck!
(111 reviews)
