Classical Electricity and Magnetism by Edward Purcell

mheslep

How do you reach that conclusion?

Jorriss

Are you actually asking? It's common knowledge it's one of the most, if not the most, advanced introductory text books on E&M.

WannabeNewton

It brings out magnetism using special relativity and talks about the vector potential formulation of maxwell's equations...do you see other standard freshman level EM texts doing this?

mishima

Does anyone else have the new edition? I was aware they were changing units, but are there any other substantial changes? I've only seen the excerpt chapter pdf.

Vargo

This was my freshman EM book. I loved it. For me, the Gaussian-CGS units (k=1!) were a highlight, so I am sorry to hear that they are changing that part. Actually, if I am honest, then I will admit that MeV were confusing at first. But it made the learning all the richer once I figured it out. To be overly dramatic, this book freed me from SI rigid thinking. More realistically, I just enjoyed the course and found the physics interesting.

WannabeNewton

There are a ton of new problems, many of them having detailed solutions, and there are some new appendices and worked examples but other than that it seems the same.

mheslep

I've not reviewed the suite of EM texts. In general, outside faculty and TA's, I have not found those who have (reviewed all competing textbooks). Then of course there is second hand knowledge.

bcrowell

I ordered a copy of the 3rd edition ($76), and compared it side by side with my disintegrating copy of the 1965 1st edition. The price is amazingly reasonable compared to the kind of exploitative prices you see these days for textbooks.

One thing I'd never noticed before is that the 1st edition has a notice on its copyright page saying that it's available for royalty-free use after 1970. (It was an NSF-sponsored project.) So theoretically it's legal to scan it and put it on the web for free. However, what I find when I look around on the web is people illegally making the 2nd edition available through sleazy file-sharing sites.

The 3rd edition is almost twice the bulk of the 1st. This is mostly because there are far more problems, and many of them have complete solutions in the back of the book. This is a great new feature.

There is also an applications section at the end of every chapter.

For the most part, though, it's exactly the same text with only a very few minor changes here and there. The line art is mostly the same. The graphic design isn't as nice as in the 1st edition, which often used gray backgrounds on the figures, with a full bleed. In the 3rd edition, the figures often aren't sufficiently clearly divided from the text, and the effect is extremely ugly.

The big change is the switch to SI units. Three cheers.

atyy

From the preface of the 3rd edition of Jackson: For many years Ed Purcell and I had a pact to support each other in the use of Gaussian units. Now I have betrayed him!

jasonRF

That sounds great - the next generation of students to use this book will certainly benefit from the extra problems with solutions. Much more convenient than what I tried to do: dig through the physics library attempting to find solved problems in books that were at the appropriate level! As an EE I of course use SI exclusively, but I found that learning EM in cgs first did not present any kind of problem later on in my education / carreer, so I am mostly agnostic to that change.