How many problems to do from Jackson EM?

[hgandh]

Ideally one would want to do every problem in the book. However, the problems just take too much time and I was wondering if anyone had a recommended problem sets that tests the essentials of each chapter. I am self-studying from the book and feel some problems are overkill.
Thanks

 

[davidbenari]

I haven't done this myself, but If I were you I would check out MIT's OCW site and see if their graduate EM courses use this book. Most probably you'll see assigned homeworks from this book. Check it out. You're definitely not the first one to think this book is a hard time, if you check out amazon's page you'll see many people think the same...

 

[Student100]

Ideally one would want to do every problem in the book. However, the problems just take too much time and I was wondering if anyone had a recommended problem sets that tests the essentials of each chapter. I am self-studying from the book and feel some problems are overkill.
Thanks

My advice, put down Jackson and pick up Landau and Lifschitz.

Alternatively, http://physics.ucsd.edu/students/courses/spring2014/physics203b/?page=Homework which gives you some problems from the text chapters 7-10 that grad students would do at UCSD, with solutions, exams and those solutions.

The solution sets for Jackson can be found online with a little work, and you can always reference them when completely stuck. Further, using a little programming you can get the gist of the physics without doing the messy calculations by hand, and possibly do every problem if that's your end goal.