Electricity and Magnetism

This is the best freshman E&M text of all time -- provided that the class consists of students ready to handle the material at this level. Although the necessary tools of vector calculus are introduced from scratch, I doubt that most students would be able to get up to speed unless they had already had vector calculus or were at least taking it concurrently.The best known innovation of this book was the presentation of magnetism as a consequence of relativity. The book assumes you've already learned special relativity. (There is an appendix on SR in the 3rd edition, but realistically that wouldn't be sufficient.)I ordered a copy of the 3rd edition ($76), and compared it side by side with my disintegrating but much-loved copy of the 1965 1st edition. The price is amazingly reasonable compared to the kind of exploitative prices you see these days for textbooks.One thing I'd never noticed before is that the 1st edition has a notice on its copyright page saying that it's available for royalty-free use after 1970. (It was an NSF-sponsored project.) So theoretically it's legal to scan it and put it on the web for free. However, what I find when I look around on the web is people illegally making the 2nd edition available through sleazy file-sharing sites.The most important change is the switch from cgs to SI units. Three cheers. Without this change the book would have stayed in the ghetto forever.The 3rd edition is almost twice the bulk of the 1st. This is mostly because there are far more problems, and many of them have complete solutions in the back of the book. This is a great new feature.There is also an applications section at the end of every chapter.For the most part, though, it's exactly the same text with only a very few minor changes here and there. The line art is mostly the same. The graphic design isn't as nice as in the 1st edition, which often used gray backgrounds on the figures, with a full bleed. In the 3rd edition, the figures often aren't sufficiently clearly divided from the text, and the effect is extremely ugly.

I would say this would make a great adjunct to Griffiths canonical textbook for undergraduate studies, rather than the main book. The reason is well documented elsewhere-but essentially this book assumes a working knowedge of vector calculus (product laws for instance) whereas Griffiths devotes a chapter to it.Along with the Classical Mechanics book by the same author, this should be on the bookshelf of any college level physics student.

I studyed it in my years of university, subsidiarly to Halliday (the main text) and liked very much of Purcell's book. It's more hard that Halliday's and i don't liked of CGS system. But the explanations are good and the problems were interestings, and many times challenging. Now appear a new version, aperfectaly, corrected, MKS system, and with many problens solved and others proposed. The level is from intermedieted to advanced, in betwin Halliday and Reitz (or Griffts), more near Reitz. It is time of review my forty years old knwoledge of eletromagnetism and it will be with Purcell's.

I used this book for my second semester calculus-based physics course at Harvard. The textbook is of really high quality, with thorough and in-depth explanation of all the concepts. There are plenty of problems and exercises, both with and without solutions. The book makes it so much easier to do well in your E&M class!

Purcell takes an unconventional approach in this book. Most of the electromagnetics is derived from three laws in this book: Coulomb's law, charge invariance, and special theory of relativity. This approach is especially beautiful and fruitful as the reader can make deep connections between electricity and magnetism. Yet, the book is easy to digest as most of the material is explained over experiments with very useful illustrations. The clarity and precise language with which the material is presented almost qualifies the text for bedtime reading. Finally, each chapter ends with practical applications of the topics covered.

One of the best basic physics books I've read. I think if you want to learn "real" physics, you'd start with this book. It shows how the work is done in practice. I was particularly fond of the sections on the "proof(s)" of the Thevenin theorem. But one problem students in today's classroom might have with the book is the length of the verbal discussions. They'd say it was "wordy." This goes along with the pressure these students exert on instructors to do "formulaic" instruction: work a problem in class, give that problem as homework and ask some close variant on the exam. All this is very concise and "fair." Unfortunately, that's no way to learn the physics. My one criticism is that there is really no discussion of guided waves or propagation, or modes in a guide or cavity. I think the omission of heavy discussion of relativity was a positive. Instructors love that topic, as it (and quantum mechanics) form a large part of their research. But it is extraneous at this level of development. I think this text offers just the right amount of relativity discussion.

It's clean and definitely new. Moreover, the shipping is faster than usual which is out of my expectation. The book is really helpful for my Physics major study. The main difference from the second edition is that the third one contains more difficult problems. Moreover, there are solutions to all the problems (not exercises) so that after finishing the problems in my own way I could check whether my method is wrong or not and compare the other methods. Great help for my study!