Customer Reviews

Optics (4th Edition)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I used this textbook for an introductory optics course. It was an average book. There weren't any examples in the core of the text, but fortunately the author did include worked solutions in the appendix for some of the end-of-chapter problems, which I used as examples to work from. Most of the questions that were answered were the easier ones, that anybody halfway intelligent should be able to figure out.

On the plus side, there were lots of equations and lots of description to help learn the material. Some sections were better than others. The sections on mirrors and lenses, for example, were wonderful; I never understood that stuff in high school, and Hecht made it all clear. The tables he had for the different types of lenses/mirrors and their properties were great. An example of a poor section was that on diffraction; I had no clue what he was talking about.

The book is a bit expensive, but overall it is alright; certainly better than some of the other books I used during my degree!

If this book had to stand on its own I'd say it is a failure. The author is very good about explaining concepts. For example, he tries to make practical sense out of reflection, refraction, and the Fresnel equations via conversational examples in nature such as the "mirages" you see on highways in the hot summertime. Also, his derivations are quite detailed and complete. However, he works very few numerical examples. He just expects you to do so in the exercises with no demonstration by him on how to do it. As someone has previously mentioned, the subject of Fourier optics is spread all over the book in a completely disorganized manner.

So why am I giving it four stars? Because, unbelievably, it is the best optics textbook out there for those of us seeking an academic treatment and not some popular mechanics text. Also, the author has written an outstanding Schaum's outline, Schaum's Outline of Optics, that goes hand in hand with this book. They complement each other perfectly. Simply read a chapter of this book, go to the corresponding chapter in the Schaum's outline, and there the same author shows practical problems and their solutions.

If the author ever writes another edition of this text it would be great if he folded in some of the practicality of his Schaum's outline into this very complete but unpractical text.

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.

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.

This is a fairly good textbook trapped in an inexcusably bad layout. I've worked my way through about half the textbook now and there are several sections which contain lots of helpful figures. However, there seems to have been almost no effort made to put the text on the same or facing page along with the figures, so you spend a lot of your time on these sections reading a paragraph, jumping ahead to find the figure, going back to read the next paragraph, again jumping ahead for that figure, and so on. It's bad enough when the figures are sparse, but when they are as dense as they are in some sections and as critical as they are to understanding the material, it's hard to stomach. As a result, I find that this book wastes a lot of my time. This is in the Third Edition, so you could hope things have changed, but I wouldn't bet a hundred bones on it.

Also, to reiterate what another reviewer said, there are subjects like Fourier Optics which are spread out throughout the book more than is necessary. This makes it a fairly poor reference, since you sometimes have to dig up separate chunks of material in a piecemeal fashion.

Still, for the level of the book, I am struggling to find something better. Born and Wolf is pretty good, but it's more of a graduate level text. Judging by the quality of the material available, textbook authorship must be harder than it seems.

I found this book alone not enough to actually learn the subject. In conjunction with good lectures, or with other resources, the subject could be adequately covered.

I strongly agree with the details of the review by Michael Danzinger.

Let me be frank, I didn't like this book much at all. It was very bizarre mathematically and the overall structure seemed really weird. It jumped around in difficulty a lot and in my opinion needs a good editor to fix it up. Some sections are way too short while others are just way too long. Also there are absolutely no examples!!!! This is just annoying since it's good to see the derivation of a theory but a nice application of the equations would be great and not put in the problems at the end of the chapter.

I did enjoy some of his treatments various geometric optics and the topics of thick lenses was quite nice as well.

But as other reviewers have said, I haven't been able to find a better intro optics book out there that isn't at too high of a level. Thus this is probably the best lower level undergrad book in optics available. However I would be very much willing to have someone prove me wrong.

EDIT: I should mention that the Schaum's outline he wrote does contain a lot of examples but it would have been nice to have them in the book!

I recommend this as the first optics book you ever read. Emphasis on conceptual understanding, carried by excellent and profuse illustrations and description, allow the reader a deeper understanding of what's going on; mathematical descriptions stay shallow.

As an undergraduate I find this book incredibly confusing. Hecht seems to take pleasure in using fancy words and hyped up sentences when simpler statements will do. Instead of deriving equations by first starting with intuiton, then using substitution of previous results etc, he prefers to talk his way into derivations using sometimes page long reasoning. Sometimes it's Ok to let the equations speak for themselves. If this is considered the standard in optics textbooks I am afraid of opening the mess that other textbooks must be.

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?