No-Nonsense Electrodynamics: A Student Friendly Introduction

This book arrived dented and creased having been insubstantially packaged in a thin plastic bag - with no documentation/ invoice slip inside. I have read through the first fifty pages. You could not possibly learn electrodynamics from this - the 'overview' in the beginning would be incomprehensible to anyone who has not studied the material elsewhere already. The English is careless and slapdash with grammatical errors and typos on nearly every page. The text is interspersed with poor quality 'sketches' - often unlabelled and all un-numbered. Most of these sketches do nothing to enhance understanding of the material other than fill up space. The margins on the pages are colossal - nearly a third of the page - many have marginal 'notes' - often stating that 'this will be covered in a later chapter' seemingly attempting to placate the bemused or confused reader. Many are just blank space. Even more bizarre are the wholly blank pages - 24,25,89,90,156,158,160,172,216,220,222 for example have no text on at all. I notice in reviews of the author's other books, reference to the poor English and grammatical errors littering the pages. This is similar - I was wincing in places. This book seems to have been thrown together and cannot have been reviewed by any kind of academic or reviewer whose native tongue is English before being published. Neither the back cover nor the preface gives any indication of prerequisite knowledge of the reader - basic mathematical knowledge required is slung into an 80 page appendix. I bought this book with an Amazon gift voucher after a quick flick through the 'Look Inside' and having read only the positive reviews of the author's earlier book 'Physics from Symmetry' in the usually very good Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics series. I was intending to give it to a student in his first year of a physics degree. I shall not be inflicting this upon him. As with all books I purchase I shall persevere with reading it ( there are no exercises or problems at all to test understanding) as far as possible but I warn any potential reader to think carefully before parting with £20 for such shoddy workmanship and also to read the critical reviews of the author's previous textbook first.

Reading just after the volume on classical mechanics. This professor is writing the perfect style I had always looking for, you go through the pages feeling he’s there with you accompanying and anticipating every question that you may have! Astonishing didactic style for treatises of mathematical physics! Looking forward to move to quantum mechanics and will try QFT as well. Just wondering why he hasn’t published (yet) a book on relativity, let’s hope for the future.

An extremely self-study friendly introduction to the subject without loss of advanced concepts. It covers not just Maxwell's equations, but also aspects of important related ideas eg, Einstein's special relativity, differential geometry, and guage theory, (but not, of course, QED quantum electrodynamics). The hundreds of simple hand drawings are exceptionally helpful to the great text.

The books of Jakub Schwichtenberg are truly the best beginner friendly book for physics ever, and they will have a place in my heart for the rest of life. But the book that I especially liked was the Electrodynamics book So positives about the book are the explanation of the topic, which very few authors can do well when they write about electrodynamics. It was a great introduction to Vector Calculus, there are other book recommendations in the book, if you wanted to know something in a more detail. But the explanation of the Maxwell equations, solutions and step by step approach, was something fantastic. Now the negatives of the book, are I think no exercises in the whole book, which I can get that because it wants to be "people" friendly, but especially when self learner wants to learn the topic, and especially electrodynamics, I believe there could be few exercises put in the book. Conclusion would be that if you are a physics student who wants to learn physics and is really enthusiastic about it, books of Mr. Schwichtenberg are "must have", but there are no exercises in the book, so you could just look at his recommendation of books, where are exercises.

This is a very good book if you want to understand what electrodynamics is. As the other books of this serie the aim is really to make it understandible for all. The usual 3 parts: basics, concrete example déveloped in details (as application of basics) and more advance explanations are terribly efficient and very rare, so do not hesitate!

Gostei muito da maneira como os temas são apresentados (top - down). A profundidade do tratamento matemático e a precisão na apresentação dos conceitos físicos são excelentes.