The basic ideas, the pictures, the diagrams, etc, found here, typically show up in enough books if you look for them that I don't feel that this was the main li

The basic ideas, the pictures, the diagrams, etc, found here, typically show up in enough books if you look for them that I don't feel that this was the main limiting factor in my physics education. The difficulty of Jackson (which doesn't show up until grad school for most students) is in the problem sets, not the ideas behind the equations (which most students have a had at least two courses in already). I don't believe that having a more 'intuitive' idea of the equations really helps all that much, as the intuition needed for solving the problems isn't really physical, but mathematical. Which integrals are solvable, which order of integration will make this tractable, do I need to use properties of Bessel functions here, etc. We can argue whether getting good at this sort of thing is actually useful for physicists, but I wouldn't know. Very few of us ended up becoming researchers in the field.