Optics

by Eugene Hecht

Book Overview

Accurate, authoritative and comprehensive, Optics, Fourth Edition has been revised to provide readers with the most up-to-date coverage of optics. The market leader for over a decade, this book provides a balance of theory and instrumentation, while also including the necessary classical background. The writing style is lively and accessible. For college instructors, students, or anyone interested in optics.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 020111609X
• ISBN13: 9780201116090
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company
• Length: 640 Pages
• Weight: 3.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 8.7" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful

As an introductory book teaching classical (and some modern) optics, this wonderful book is difficult to beat. It prepares you remarkably well for any direction in optics you then want to set off in. The explanations are mostly crystal-clear, crafted with great care. Lots of words and diagrams, not too much math, but enough math to facilitate useful calculations. An excellent under-graduate text, to my mind, the best available today.

the premier 1st text in optics for > 20 years

The back of the book says that it has been the premier optics text for a decade. I would disagree; suggesting that it has been so for well over 20 years. I used the first edition in 1981-2, when Hecht co-authored it with Zajac. This fourth edition is significantly larger. Comparing the two editions is interesting. Certainly, many chapters are the same. After all, it is meant as a first book on optics for the physics major, and much of the theory and experiments have been unchanged for decades. It is also nice to see that Hecht has refrained from a gratuitous use of colour. Nowadays, many freshman texts in the sciences are chockablock with colour, both in the text and illustrations. But this is not a frosh text. A student who gets to the level of using this book is likely in her 3rd or 4th undergrad year, or perhaps even a grad student. Thus, she is probably already dedicated to majoring in physics, and does not need the frills of colour. Plus, to be sure, not using colour also saves the publisher a lot. There is new material scattered throughout. Often reflecting experimental advances in recent years. Hence a quick description of terahertz rays [T-rays], and their use for nondestructive scanning of materials.

We are recommending this book for UVM

I am recommending that the University of Vermont library purchase copies of this text in the 3rd edition. I am also recommending that it be used as the optics text for our undergraduate curriculum. In grad school,I used the 2nd edition and found it to be perfect in its mixture of theory, historical background and cool experiments to try -- like the Poisson dot. Although I am in astrophysics research now, I occasionally go back to the section on Fresnel diffraction and the Cornu spiral to dig out insight for use in quantum field theory and path integrals!

Best all-around optics text since Jenkins & White!

This text has the perfect mix of mathematics and amusement. Covering a very broad spectrum, Hecht gives brief historical introductions to the topics, includes the math needed for reasonable mastery of the subject, and often offers the reader a homemade experiment to demonstrate the concepts. The figures are good, as are the problems at the end of each chapter. As an optical engineer, I find myself referring to the section on Fresnel reflection often, but some of the later chapters on Fourier optics and coherence theory make fascinating and not overwhelming night reading. I recommend this text highly to undergraduate instructors and optical engineers, but perhaps the highest compliment I can give this book is that I frequently recommend it to technical people who rarely dabble in optics, but who need a readable reference on the widest variety of optics topics.

Excellent Optics Intro, and also good reference book

This book is constantly referred to by those who have been practicing in the field of optics for years and years, but also serves as an excellent introduction to optics. The explanations are simple, clear and direct. The explanations in Hecht often settle complicated arguments on esoteric regions of optics, by reducing the argument to first principles and clear, concise descriptions.