PHY3310 Electromagnetic Theory I: Home

This well-known undergraduate electrodynamics textbook is now available in a more affordable printing from Cambridge University Press. The Fourth Edition provides a rigorous, yet clear and accessible treatment of the fundamentals of electromagnetic theory and offers a sound platform for explorations of related applications (AC circuits, antennas, transmission lines, plasmas, optics and more). Written keeping in mind the conceptual hurdles typically faced by undergraduate students, this textbook illustrates the theoretical steps with well-chosen examples and careful illustrations. It balances text and equations, allowing the physics to shine through without compromising the rigour of the math, and includes numerous problems, varying from straightforward to elaborate, so that students can be assigned some problems to build their confidence and others to stretch their minds.

Practically all of modern physics deals with fields—functions of space (or spacetime) that give the value of a certain quantity, such as the temperature, in terms of its location within a prescribed volume. Electrodynamics is a comprehensive study of the field produced by (and interacting with) charged particles, which in practice means almost all matter.
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.