Dynamics and radiation part of Jackson's book - reading advice I am new to Jackson's book on Classical Electrodynamics, and I want to focus on the dynamics and radiation parts of the book, as I have limited time and I am already familiar with electro-/magneto-statics from other references. Can I jump straight to the chapter on Maxwell's equations and continue from there (including solving exercises) without an issue or pestering interdependencies? In other words, are those chapters self-contained, or does the book (or exercises) cross-refer a lot to earlier chapters so that it would be annoying or feel an incomplete study if I skipped them?
 A: This will depend a lot on how familiar you really are with electrostatics.  Jackson spends chapters 1–4 of Classical Electrodynamics on electrostatics (which takes the majority of the first semester when I teach graduate-level classical electrodynamics) for a reason.  While the book assumes that the reader is familiar with much of the physics of interacting nonrelativistic charges, there is a tremendous amount of mathematical development that goes on in these chapters.  More than one colleague has told me that they remember the first semester of Jackson-level electrodynamics as more of a math course than a physics course.
Many other books, like Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics cover a lot of the same qualitative physics but tend to shy away from the full generality of the mathematical solutions.  Griffiths, for example, does not cover cylindrical coordinates, problems without azimuthal symmetry, or the specifics of any multipoles beyond the dipole.  Jackson, in contrast, will often consider examples with no simplifying assumptions at all, because his goal is to prepare the student to solve any real electrostatics problem that they might encounter.  Moreover, the undergraduate books typically do not cover the full method of Green's functions, which allows one to reduce the solutions of an arbitrary Dirichlet boundary value problem for a given region of space into the solutions of one particularly simple boundary value problem.*
By the time magnetism and time-dependent phenomena are introduced, starting in chapter 5 of Classical Electrodynamics, the reader is expected to have developed a significant degree of facility with the mathematics of potential theory, as studied in the first four chapters.  The problems in Classical Electrodynamics are infamous for their level of difficulty, and for many of them it may be challenging to even figure out how to start them without either guidance or extensive experience in the subject matter.  By chapter 6, the book assumes that the reader has a clear understanding of how to set up and deal with a fairly wide class of mathematical problems, and if you jump into the book at this stage without experience doing graduate-level statics problems, you will probably find yourself completely at sea.
*If you do not understand this sentence, that is a pretty strong indication that you are not ready for the later chapters of Jackson's book.
