Electrodynamics (Chicago Lectures in Physics)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book!
Review: Everybody says if you want a graduate text on E&M, your only choice is Jackson. Happily that is no longer true. Melia's text is quite well-structured, starting with an empirical basis for Maxwell's equations, then moving on to electrostatics, magnetostatics, pre-relativistic radiation theory, special relativity, Lagrangian formulation of E&M, relativistic radiation theory, and lastly a chapter on special topics (multipole moments, Bremsstrahlung, magnetohydrodynamics). The exposition is clearer than Jackson, and the reader is not encumbered with extra information.
There are no problems in the book, so it may work best as a complement to Jackson (or perhaps Jackson may work best as a complement to Melia). In either case, this is a very readable book, and an excellent source for graduate students taking E&M.

Rating:
Summary: Good book
Review: Fulvio Melia's Electrodynamics offers a concise, compact, yet complete treatment of this important branch of physics. Unlike most of the standard texts, Electrodynamics neither assumes familiarity with basic concepts nor ends before reaching advanced theoretical principles. Instead this book takes a continuous approach, leading the reader from fundamental physical principles through to a relativistic Lagrangian formalism that overlaps with the field theoretic techniques used in other branches of advanced physics. Avoiding unnecessary technical details and calculations, Electrodynamics will serve both as a useful supplemental text for graduate and advanced undergraduate students and as a helpful overview for physicists who specialize in other fields.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book!
Review: This is an excellent book ... very well written. Fulvio Melia has a wonderful talent for writing in understandable language which is a great plus for students.

Rating:
Summary: Simplicity
Review: Universities do not force their graduate students to learn electrodynamics because it will be useful to their careers. They do it because solving well-posed, canonical problems in science's most complete subject should help the student develop a sense for simplicity and rigor. A well-taught electrodynamics course should be less about mathematical minutiae and more about how to think and present arguments.

Dr. Melia's class and text do just that. In class, Dr. Melia began each lecture at the top-left of the board, wrote and spoke clearly, rolled up past boards so that people who came in late could quickly get up to speed, and asked test questions he had prepared the class for. His text reveals the same eye for simplicity--and, more than an introduction to particles and fields, is a beautiful lesson on *how to teach*.