Customer Reviews

Introduction to Optical Microscopy

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This is a must for those that want to understand how microscopes work. It provides you with a coherent theoretical framework to adress all classic techniques but also (and most importantly) "new microscopies". This books really makes you understand the physics that underlie optical microscopy and will surely help anyone willing to engage in this exciting field of research.

I am a graduate student who works on optical microscopes. I actually took the class with the author of this book, so perhaps I am a bit biased, however I found the book to be very insightful.

Pros:
-The book has good coverage of many modern optical imaging techniques, including OCT, Digital Holography, Two Photon microscopy, some of the more standard non-linear techniques, and super-resolution techniques.
-Several gems of intuition in the book
-There is a reasonable amount of math to back up the descriptions, but it is "good" math because it is presented in a way that really reinforces the concepts, it is not math-for-math's-sake like I have seen in many esoteric graduate-level textbooks.
-I like how the references are discussed in the test (i.e. "see [5] for a very readable review, and see [6-8] for more in-depth reviews with an emphasis on ...")
-Intuitive approach to 3D Optical Transfer functions, interesting and unique discussion of radiometery

Cons:
-some of the notation is slightly non-standard, but usually this places more emphasis on the content and less on the math (so not necessarily a con)
-a few of the earlier chapters (on background material) are a little hard for an introduction level book