Customer Reviews

Elements of Modern Optical Design (Wiley Series in Pure and Applied Optics)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

O'Shea is probably the easiest reading optics book I have ever read. It had great examples and gave a very solid overview of many topics. The y-u ray tracing technique he lays out is very powerful yet simple and is a must-know method for quick and dirty design of optical systems. O'Shea doesn't go into extreme detail and really only includes vital equations so the book is more of a concept book than a dictionary of equations. Another great book to check out is "Introduction to Optics" by Pedrotti & Pedrotti.

This is a great book. For a working engineer in optics it is one of the three you need to survive. I rate it just under Smith, and Kingslake for usable content; which is no small tribute. It is written in plain, clear Engish with worked numerical examples. Those examples are well chosen to cover the interesting uses of a technique. I'm paying the author the ultimate compliment. I'm in the process of ordering a second copy, since somebody snagged mine.

This is one of the few optics textbooks that includes an accessible, engineering-oriented discussion of gaussian beam propagation (Chapter 7). Useful for the designer of laser scanners, etc. That chapter alone makes this a book worth having.

This book is pretty good.
There are no answers to the homework problems, so it is hard to tell if you have mastered the concepts when used as self-study.
It would be nice if it went into a little more depth in places.
While it shows the far-field spot patterns (point-spread functions), it doesn't describe the near-field phase can lead to such PSF's even for on-axis objects.

I only had the opportunity to scan the texbook to extract technical info to understand a training manual written by Donald O'Shea for Photon Inc. (who makes the BeamScan machine). The manual is an absolute disaster: numerous diagrams are wrong; some instructions are incomplete; theory is given in hard-to-follow style. I got the training manual for free and did not have enough courage to buy O'Shea's textbook (at $130), i.e., if a training manual is that bad, the textbook must be in similar shape. I expected better from a PhD professor at Georgia Tech.

This book has not at all been tasteful for me. I think than the author should rename it: "How to design a laser printer for dummier". I honestly don't know why and what an example about laser printer is doing in such book. Ok, now because I read it I know how the laser printer I use work. But even that part is incomplete. I have seen in an optical handbook more and more information about that. Only the different point shape/pattern was a one page table and O¡¯Shea did not speak at all about that choice.

So, let¡¯s talk about this famous laser printer example. Just in itself you don¡¯t think so than such apparatus is more relevant of non imaging system and it¡¯s not at all a good end for a book about optic design in general. The right place to speak about that could be in some expert textbook witch one is really dedicated to non-imaging system.

I can't say this book is full of lack, hole and omission, etc. But It¡¯s really difficult to fellow where Mr. Donald C. O'Shea is interested to bring you.