Ronald Fox, a professor of physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, opined that this book compares well with Classical Electricity and Magnetism by Melba Phillips and Wolfgang Panofsky, and The Classical Theory of Fields by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz. Classical Electrodynamics is much broader and has many more problems for students to solve. Landau and Lifshitz is simply too dense to be used as a textbook for beginning graduate students. However, the problems in Jackson do not pertain to other branches of physics, such as condensed-matter physics and biophysics. For optimal results, one must fill in the steps between equations and solve a lot of practice problems. Suggested readings and references are valuable. The third edition retains the book's reputation for the difficulty of the exercises it contains, and for its tendency to treat non-obvious conclusions as self-evident. Fox stated that Jackson is the most popular text on classical electromagnetism in the post-war era and that the only other graduate book of comparable fame is Classical Mechanics by Herbert Goldstein. However, while Goldstein's text has been facing competition from Vladimir Arnold 's Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics, Jackson remained unchallenged (as of 1999). Fox took an advanced course on electrodynamics in 1965 using the first edition of Jackson and taught graduate electrodynamics for the first time in 1978 using the second edition.