World Famous Comics: Classical Electrodynamics Third Edition
Classical Electrodynamics Third Edition
By: John David Jackson Publisher: Wiley Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Wiley Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 808 Publication Date: August 10, 1998
Product Description: A revision of the defining book covering the physics and classical mathematics necessary to understand electromagnetic fields in materials and at surfaces and interfaces. The third edition has been revised to address the changes in emphasis and applications that have occurred in the past twenty years.
Nemesis of Graduate Students This book is not even close to a textbook. If you take the problems out from the book, it will look like a "review of mathematical methods in classical electrodynamics."
There is not a single explanation in the book. The whole book goes in this structure "This is this and that is that".
This book may be interesting and insightful to a student who has a strong background in mathematical methods and electrodynamics, who knows tensors, special functions and vector calculus by heart, and for one who has a lot of time to spend calculating.
This book also has a weird notation, which is hard to get used to.
If this book is required for you to use. Then good luck!!! you have to suffer through your course. If it is not required for you to use then buy it if you are really interested in this material, or if you are working on a problem (and by problem I mean a theoretical problem) and you want to see some different approaches. Or buy his book if you already got your PhD and tenured and you need a refresher.
I do not fall into any of the categories above and I hate this book.
I love this book! This book is tough and the problems can be a 'nightmare', but it is a great book. I am a graduate student in physics and I just love how it goes into so many aspects of Electrodynamics and in detail.
Good for brushing up math skills I, like many others, used this book for graduate E&M. The text is easy to follow, however, for those who haven't seen the mathematical derivation techniques for quite some time, it is best to pause and take a moment reviewing how one equation becomes the succeeding equation. Jackson often, but not always, quotes what technique was involved so it shouldn't be too hard to look up vector identities and techniques involving standard functions (orthonormal, Green, etc.) in any advanced calculus text. For those who love the challenge of solving a variety of problems, this is your book. Jackson exercises your mind in such a way that you should find yourself pulling everything and anything you can remember (as far back as those unpleasant undergraduate days) applicable to the problem at hand and piece the puzzle together until you arrive at "a" solution. During my graduate studies, we used F. Melia's "Electrodynamics" alongside Jackson. However, it was extremely cumbersome working with something in Gaussian units and MKSA at the same time between the two books, but there was a good reason to use both. Melia's book was first written to accomodate Jackson's 2nd and other E&M books written in Gaussian units, so I'm sure that the 2nd edition Jackson would work very well with Melia's book. Melia most respectfully spells out the conceptual ideas (physics) for you and Jackson will nail you with the mathematical techniques involved, especially in his problem sets. Overall, I rate this a 4/5 stars simply because the 3rd edition used MKSA units, where I think Gaussian is much more elegant. Jackson explains why he decided to do this in the preface to the 3rd edition and it's all fair game. Use this book to brush up on your mathematical techniques. To be honest, Griffith's "Introduction to Electrodynamics" would be an excellent text to use before you even decide to read Jackson's or Melia's. If you can master Griffith's book first, then it would make your life better when you adventure into Jackson's 3rd.
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!
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