John David Jackson (1925–2016)

A soul crushing technical manual written by a sadist that has served as the right of passage for physics PhDs since the dawn of time. Every single one of my professors studied this book, and every single one of them hates it with a passion. While I've no intention of becoming a professor, I still wonder, will my colleagues also inflict this torture on their students? Will the cycle be perpetuated ad infinitum? How many more aspiring physicists will we leave battered and bruised at the gates show more of insanity before switching to a textbook that seeks to make electrodynamics clear and intuitive rather than a mind-numbing trip through the seventh circle of hell? show less

Everything you ever wanted to know about Classical Electro-magnetism? Probably - and a few more things besides. There's a third edition (this is the second) - I don't know what's changed.

Everything you ever wanted to know about vector calculus is probably in here, too, neatly summarised on the insides of the cover and the facing pages, which is very handy.

Have fun with Jackson and his friends, Maxwell, Bessel and Green!

This book is not fun to read, but it is pretty complete. It is still the standard text for electrodynamics in graduate school.

"Jackson E&M is about learning how to approximate reliably...the entire book, with few exceptions, is a mathematical discussion on how to solve [the same] 4 problems for different boundary conditions."