Game of Thrones showed that you can do a pretty good adaptation of a novel by turning it into a television series. Game of Thrones does cut a significant portion of the novels, but if you compare their current 50-hour set (with ten more coming soon) to even a generous 8-movie series (assuming they follow the Harry Potter novel and split the last book - though maybe that's only for YA stuff,) you'd still find yourself with a tiny fraction of what you could get on TV.
I had heard about The Magicians, but it was only after I watched the pilot episode that I picked up the first book and started reading it. I'm currently a bit over halfway through the second book in the series.
It's very clear that the show is not following the book's plot directly. There is a similar primary threat and certainly some familiar scenarios, but some of the main cast is totally different, and they are of course trying to cover Julia's backstory in the first season instead of waiting for the second, as the books do. But much like what's happening in Brakebills, Julia is dealing with a very different plot.
Being familiar with an original work makes watching an adaptation tricky. Most of the time, you find yourself disappointed, often because things are changed so significantly. Sometimes, there's a sort of weird uncanny valley feeling - for example, I watched the movie version of John Dies at the End shortly after reading the book, and was shocked to see the plot appear almost word-for-word faithful until it suddenly bridged the gap between an event about halfway in to events that were maybe the final fifth of the story. It made perfect sense - they couldn't do the book's three major adventures in a single film, and they managed to stitch it together decently, but it was still a strange feeling.
The Magicians, the novel, is actually pretty light on plot (in stark contrast with the second novel, the Magician King, which feels very structured.) It's really more about Quentin Coldwater's disastrous lack of satisfaction with all the awesome (literally awesome) things life has given to him, and thus has a fairly episodic structure.
The show tosses away a lot of the book's events and even shuffles out some of the characters for new ones. Josh is nowhere to be seen, while Janet seems to have simply been renamed Margot and there's a whole new character named Kady. Dynamics are shifted as well, integrating Penny into the main cast. Some of that's practical - novelists can throw in a new character easily, whereas shows have to cast someone and keep them interested enough to stay on.
So really, what is preserved is the personality of the characters (with some changes - show Quentin is a bit more likable than the one in the book) and much of the series lore. In the book, the reemergence of The Beast and the revelation of who it really is was designed to catch us just after we might have filed away those questions as no longer important (though I totally called who it was.) On the show, the Beast serves as a clearer Big Bad of season one.
Even though I'm a neophyte to the books (being really only halfway through the series,) part of me bristles at these changes. On the other hand, the show seems to be having more fun. One of the sort of masochistic elements of the books is that it's clearly written for readers who enjoy fantasy literature, but it then more or less chastises us for wanting to live in a magical world. It's a novel approach to the genre and earned through the characterization, but it casts a bleak light on any thoughts of escapism. The show is plenty dark (in fact, that darkness has been ramped up quicker than it was in the books,) but somehow manages to maintain the idea that, yes, even if you learn magic you have to find a way to deal with your shit, but having magic will not inherently fuck your shit up.
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