Generally regarded as a standard undergraduate text on the subject,[1] it began as lecture notes that have been perfected over time.

A table for converting between SI and Gaussian units is given in Appendix C.[4] Griffiths said he was able to reduce the price of his textbook on quantum mechanics simply by changing the publisher, from Pearson to Cambridge University Press.

Paul D. Scholten, a professor at Miami University (Ohio), opined that the first edition of this book offers a streamlined, though not always in-depth, coverage of the fundamental physics of electrodynamics.

According to Robert W. Scharstein from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Alabama, the mathematics used in the third edition is just enough to convey the subject and the problems are valuable teaching tools that do not involve the "plug and chug disease."

Although students of electrical engineering are not expected to encounter complicated boundary-value problems in their career,[note 1] this book is useful to them as well, because of its emphasis on conceptual rather than mathematical issues.

He argued that with this book, it is possible to skip the more mathematically involved sections to the more conceptually interesting topics, such as antennas.

[6]Colin Inglefield, an associate professor of physics at Weber State University (Utah), commented that the third edition is notable for its informal and conversational style that may appeal to a large class of students.

[7] Physicists Yoni Kahn of Princeton University and Adam Anderson of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory indicated that Griffiths' Electrodynamics offers a dependable treatment of all materials in the electromagnetism section of the Physics Graduate Record Examinations (Physics GRE) except circuit analysis.