Electromagnetism
by: John Clarke Slater
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This book is worth buying for two good reasons 1) its an excellent treatment of extremely important concepts of electricity, magnetism and interaction of light with matter and 2) because its very affordable and very readable. Its good read for physicists, and its more than useful for material and / or polymer scientists, who use light as a tool to investigate properties of matter. Basic concepts are explained quite well here, and like many other Dover texts, it is terse, cheap and yet masterful.
The books by Slater (one of the great professors at MIT) are known by the low sophistication of formalism combined with a deep physical insight, apparent in the way problems are solved, using analogies, clever simplifications, numerical estimates, etc. It's physics, Fermi style. Though the theory is very sound, it is in the problems that the book excells. If you work through them, you're done with electromagnetism, and you'll love it forever.
Not for the novice, ... you need a Calculus course! This is one of the finest books on E&M. Uses SI units, ... units cause much confusion in E&M, this book was one of the first to use SI units. As most introductory Calculus based courses now use SI units this is a good second course. Very good example using the "method of images," a topic that confused me my first time through. I had a Physics prof. that gave me good advice at this point, ... I am a good, not a gifted science student, my prof. had the modesty to tell me to move on, ... "nobody understands Physics with one reading, ... or even two, sometimes it takes years, or even a lifetime." This book reads well and treats a few difficult topics with the simplest examples possible. You need only basic calculus and desire, and possibly more than one reading. I stick this book in my back pocket, just in case a little insight comes my way.
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