Optics [Hardcover]

Eugene Hecht (Author), Karen Guardino (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0201838877 | ISBN-13: 978-0201838879 | Publication Date: August 1997 | Edition: 3 Sub

Accurate, comprehensive and precise, this revision provides students with the most up-to-date coverage of optics. Responsive to students' needs, the focus of the revision was to fine tune the pedagogy, modernize the discourse, and update the content. The third edition continues the gradually modernizing treatment of the previous edition by imparting an appreciation of the central role of atomic scattering, providing an understanding of the insightful perspective offered by the Fourier Theory, and by, from the outset, explicating the underlying quantum mechanical nature of light. Additionally, the third edition addresses all of today's significant technological advances. As always, Hecht provides a good balance of theory and instrumentation, while also providing readers with classical background. The writing style is lively and colorful, with historical anecdotes and citations, and at the request of previous edition users, Hecht has included about 125 new problems, designed primarily to develop students' analytic skills.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 694 pages
• Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company; 3 Sub edition (August 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201838877
• ISBN-13: 978-0201838879
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 8.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #625,736 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Worst Book--But the Only Book, April 5, 2006

By 

Michael M. Danziger (Venice, CA/Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Optics (Hardcover)

I have now used Hecht as the primary text for four classes (physical optics, intro to geometric optics, geometric optics 1 and fourier optics) and have not been very happy with the book. The book lacks structure, especially on the subject of Fourier optics and lacks examples throughout. It is slightly compensated for by a plethora of diagrams, graphs, photos and the likes but--like most texts filled with pictures--they do not generally contribute significantly to the didactic success of the book.

The treatment of geometric optics is suitable because the subject is all but obsolete in our age of lens design software and an engineer really needs only moderate knowledge of the third order theory equations and more of an understanding of what aberrations are and why apertures help etc.

The treatment of Fourier optics is unacceptable. For starters, the necessary information for a full treatment of Fourier optics is spread out over three chapters (7,11 and 14 if memory serves me) and the meaning of the transform and all of the little tricks that can be done with it is all but completely lost. Fourier optics is a losely defined subject as it is and with Hecht's treatment, it comes off as a bunch of unrelated phenomena. I may be complaining more about the structure of the course I was in which based itself almost entirely upon Hecht but the fact remains, Hecht is not a good text to learn Fourier from. I personally recommend Steward's text as an introduction because it avoids all of Hecht's pitfalls.

Physical optics is probably the best treated subject of the subjects that I have learned from Hecht. Then again, it is a pretty straightforward subject on the simple level of interference that most freshman (as I was) are exposed to.

That said, I must say that Hecht is the only text out there for an undergraduate studying optics in depth. Born wrote a great book but it is difficult to learn from. Jenkins and White is a bit too brief on many subjects. Fowles as well. Hecht remains, despite all of its flaws, really the only choice for undergraduate students of optics. At least, under one cover. Fishing around here and there, a library-adept student can piece together a better text but I would still say, if you are studying a lot of optics on the undergraduate level and are only going to buy one book, buy Hecht.

But before you buy anything, fish around online. I found a text on archive.org from 1901 which dealt with geometric optics quite nicely. There are assorted pdfs, wikipedia articles and course sites which together can make up the better part of a textbook.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good for intuition, but uneven mathematically, October 28, 2001

By 

Gerald J. Nora - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Optics (Hardcover)

Hecht did a great job of giving you visually appealing (as is only appropriate for an Optics text!) descriptions of optical phenomena. I've been frustrated by other texts which do extensive mathematical derivations without telling you what the math is supposed to describe.

On the other hand, Hecht does not give many example problems, and sometimes he entirely breezes over the math behind certain phenomena, and while I appreciate the clarity of his qualitative descriptions, I feel pretty crippled if I cannot mathematically characterize the optical systems I'm studying. On the other hand, sometimes he goes overboard with some pretty confusing math, like the math behind the Cornu spiral. This graph is used to help figure out the spacing of Fresnel diffraction lines, but Hecht layers on some very confusing electromagnetic wave theory on top of the basic function, and I had a hard time trying to understand what he was describing.

This is still a great beginning's text, but it should be bulked up a bit with more solved problems and mathematical examples, and some things like the Cornu Spiral should be wholly reworked.

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We are recommending this book for UVM, December 2, 1999

By 

Dr. Thomas J. Brueckner - See all my reviews

This review is from: Optics (Hardcover)

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!