Optics

Rating:
Summary: The most vile optics textbook available
Review: I loathed this book when I was an undergraduate student, more so than any
textbook I've ever encountered before or since. And what do you know?
Reading it again, sixteen years later, I loathe it just as much.
This was the book that instilled in me a hatred of everything and anything
to do with optics, a hatred that persists to this day.
It is the very fact that I hate optics so much that had me reading this
book again. I figured that if I was to try to learn optics again, this
time in a more pleasant fashion, perhaps the best way to start was to
return to where it all began, to go over Hecht & Zajac again to see what
they say, evaluate it in the light of my older, more knowledgeable me, and
remember essentially the points they cover for comparison when I read a
better (ie any other whatsoever) text.
Just what is it that makes this book so very bad?
Any textbook can have convoluted physical explanations that make no sense.
Likewise any textbook can include plodding mathematical explanations that
get so worn down explaining basic and trivial points that by the time you
reach their end you've forgotten what the goal was.
Any textbook author can devote no time whatsoever to such pedagogical
basics as making sure the material is ordered so that everything builds
on what came before, and that a thorough overview is presented before the
details are covered, of just what we are about to do and why.
Of course H&Z cover these basics with aplomb, but they manage to include
two far more vicious pathologies. The first, usually only found in quantum
mechanics books, is the historical pathology; they are so in love with the
history of optics that they are unwilling to ever explain anything in
modern (which usually means maxwellian) terms when they could explain it
in some alternative fashion involving some historical picture from 1820 or
1840 or whatever. The result is that instead of a coherent description of
optics as maxwell's equations followed by a long sequence of teasing out
the consequences of the equations, we see a constant hodge-podge of
different theoretical models throughout the book, each appropriate to its
particular problem and little else. Don't get me wrong; I like history as
much as (probably rather more so) than the next physicist, but I want a
textbook on optics to teach me the optics; I'll learn the history from my
history of optics textbook. We don't teach mechanics or heat or EM this
way (for the most part) and for good reason.
The second H&Z pathology is specific to their text alone, and it is that
they cannot get it through their thick skulls that they are writing a
general optics textbook, not a (very poor) reference manual, not an
experimentalist's handbook. The text is littered with bizarre asides about
how to view the issue just discussed in some variant fashion, the point of
which, to anyone who is not an expert, is completely mystifying; it would
be cruel of me to say so, but I'll do it anyway --- these inclusions seem
very much to come across as a form of insecure boasting, a way of saying,
"you think you're better than me? you think so? well what do you know
about xyz's paper in 1963? do you know how to modify the theory of
geometrical optics so as to give results just like standard diffraction
theory? no --- I thought so."
If you can, in any way whatsoever, avoid this book. Read anything else at
all to learn about optics.

Rating:
Summary: worst text I ever used
Review: Hecht is the worst text I used as an undergrad fro the following reasons.

1) He is too verbose. His explanations of phenomena could easily be more brief and a lot more clear. Some people like to hear themselves speak; Hecht likes to hear himself write. If you want a clear description of what is going on then Pedrotti is a much better text.

2) You will often find entire sections devoted to the history of optics. This is not bad and I rather enjoyed them. However, they are interspersed between critical sections that one really ought to be drawing connections between. There is nothing wrong with a stand-alone history of optics chapter or even with putting the historical development in the beginning or at the end of the chapter.

2.5) His current style makes this text useless as a quick reference. If I want to read about a Fourier transform of a triangle function, I want to be able to flip to the index, see a page number, go to it, and get the relevant information. I do not trudge through why FT is such a useful tool, transforms of gaussian and cylindrical functions, convolution, the dirac delta function, Fraunhoffer difraction, and correlation to find the ten lines that tell you what the result is. There is a figure a few pages later that gives you the same information as well. Why it is not on the same page as the relevant text I will never know. The exercise took 20 mins and principally because you have to read through the text to make sure he didn't mention on one line it under some random heading (which he did...it shows up under correlation...because its obvious to look under there apparently. There is no entry for triangle functions under the index, either by itself or under FT...you will however find an entry for Charles Wheatstone)

One might argue that if I needed such information I could use Schaums (also by Hecht) but the point is every other textbook I have used (and I have used a lot of them) facilitates information retrieval EXCEPT Hecht.

3) Even if he is too verbose, and includes unnecessary information, what is happening really ought to be clear from looking at an equation, as these are the most economical way of describing phenomena...after all thats why we use them. Hecht's equations use archaic notation and are not rigorously derived in most cases. They are spread out over the chapter (or chapters) which is a problem because he makes cross references all over the place. A summary of essential formulae at the end of a chapter would go a long way towards addressing this shortcoming.

4) Some of Hecht's figures (cartoons if you like) are too busy and too much is going on in any one to make them easily understandable. His captions are frequently uninformative. I did like that he has actual pictures all over the place, and in this respect Hecht does beat out other optics textbooks. However, negative infinity plus one does not change his score a whole lot. Optics is a subject principally learnt in lab, and the pictures help in bridging the gap between class and lab or theory and experiment.

5) The binding is shoddy.

In summary, this book sucks.

I felt strongly enough about it to compose this diatribe and if any of you want to argue about it, feel free to mail me.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Text!!!
Review: Hi:

During my study ( I do have a master in Phyyics ) I bought a ton of books. Eugen Hechts Optics is one I read front to back and understood every single concept in it. I was always pretty bad in my courses only Hecht helped me to an A. This is the book to read for linear Optics.

Rating:
Summary: Too much fancy Talk, Not enough Examples
Review: I like this book. It explains things well. It's very well written and easy to read. It has a lot of data, well organized.

However, I think students ought to be disturbed by the outrageous $108 price tag. I happened by accident to have purchased instead a brand-new version of the special "low cost" edition - intended for distribution only *outside* the US and Canada - that, even with the secondary dealer markup, cost me under thirty bucks - and still presumeably left them a profit.

Feeling ripped off yet?

Rating:
Summary: A great book!
Review: I used this book in my undergraduate optics class. It was mostly self-taught and we met to ask questions and turn in homework. I found this book challenging but not impossible. The text is very well written and the end of chapter problems didn't require a Ph.D. to solve. I learned the most from any of my classes from this book (partly due to the teaching style of the professor). I highly recommend it if you want to learn optics.

Rating:
Summary: bad book!!! wasting time!!!
Review: it is difficult to learn from. NO examples are found and I often found myself reading a section several times and still not feeling confident that I understood it.

Rating:
Summary: A good book if you're not in a hurry...
Review: The best thing about Hecht's book are the long and thorough discussions about every topic. This makes the book very adequate for self studying. On the other hand, it can be very incovenient if you're using to book to study for your exams (as I did). So I do recomend Hecht as a first reading in Optics, but be sure that you're not in a hurry...

Rating:
Summary: Theres alot in this book
Review: This book contains nearly everything you could want to know about basic optics. The solved problems are great.

Most of it is well written - I found parts of some chapters confusing (as did my classmates) - however considering the complexity of the material and the amount of material included, Hecht does a great job.

It would also be good to have a list of symbols used in equations at the back of the book like some other texts have. I remember tearing throught the book looking for a definition of a symbol on more than one occasion.

Having not used another book, I can make no comparisions, but according to most people, this is the book to get.

Rating:
Summary: Great intro to Optics!
Review: This is a wonderful introduction to the field of optics for an undergraduate with some background in physics and vector calculus (ideally a student at least in his or her sophomore year). The book has been said to be somewhat on the longer side, but because of the organization of the book it is easy to skip a couple of chapters that may be better covered in labs (e.g. geometrical optics and modern optics). Hecht has a clear style, outlines the required vector calculus and the wave equation in early chapters, which prepares the student for the rest of the book. Great stuff!