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Comment by joshhart | Hacker News Reader

I really liked Griffiths. I thought it had struck a great balance between explanations, mathematics, and examples. That book had great examples and homework questions, which I find the most useful anyway.

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Griffiths' E+M book (actually, also his QM book) is a shining star to me, a perfect example of the way introductory textbooks should be written. It ends up being criticized a lot once you get to the advanced level ("Who'd you learn quantum mechanics from, Griffithslol?"), but that's fine. It's perfect, even - if you really need all the gory stuff, sure, go get a copy of Jackson's book, or some 800 page tome on perturbation theory and the rigorous mathematical underpinnings of quantum theory, if you're going into the field you should absolutely know more than you can get from an intro text. But an introductory textbook should be exactly that. Rigor is awesome once you have the intuition down, but it's often very difficult to go the other way (mainly because a rigorous understanding is difficult to achieve without having the intuition first).

I think Griffiths EM/QM texts are fine if your not studying physics. However if you are they just skim the surface of material and this is were I think a lot of the bashing comes in. Physics curriculum (presumably like all) are a constant stepping stone and when your senior level professors expect you to know Clebsch Gordon coefficients in detail and Griffiths QM didn't then some questioning about his texts start to rise. In my opinion I thought Sakurai's QM was excellent in delivering a solid foundation in quantum mechanics

I don't mind it, this professor hated it, although it was the "recommended" book for the course. He recommended the following book, but it was out of print so he couldn't teach the course with it: http://www.amazon.com/Electromagnetic-Fields-Waves-Paul-Lorr...

It's similar to Griffiths, but I feel like it has more examples and is a little more concise in those examples than Griffiths (although I did borrow Griffiths occasionally) I grabbed one on ebay for $5 or something, and it was well worth it.

I have read both of them and I strongly prefer Griffiths to Corson. Lorraine and Corson are extremely rigorous but IMO their explanation of EM is upside down :-) They first explain special relativity and derive the EM equations using it. But historically, we had the EM equations first which forced Einstein to abandon Galilean transformations and discover special relativity.

But Lorraine and Corson just start out with special relativity, without really providing any impetus for why it is necessary, which can be found in the very first paragraph of Einstein's paper on relativity. Historically, physics has been a mystery that keeps unraveling with time. However LnC destroy the mystery by telling us who the murderer was in the opening chapter :-) We don't really appreciate how relativity was discovered. I think teaching the mystery is a very important and easily overlooked part of Physics education which Griffiths seems to appreciate but LnC don't.

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