Why does everyone hate Jackson as much as they do? It wasn't that bad. It was a bit uneven and the exercises were super hard but definitely not what I expected from all the stuff people say. I've read much harder books than Jackson, for instance Mehran Kardar's Statistical Physics (especially the exercises, yes, they are much harder than Jackson but also more interesting, because they're like "see how we derived the equations for this phenomenon? Here's a completely different phenomenon, explain that"), and lots of books in math (Rotman's Introduction to the Theory of Groups comes to mind, though if you search for online reviews people pretend it is just sweet for some reason, it also hides important stuff in the exercises which forces you to go through them, and they are hard). So yeah idk, Jackson is hard, but it's not as hard as people say, there is much harder books. One issue is that some chapters are much harder than the others and so it's like throwing you curve balls.