Customer Reviews

Optics and Photonics: An Introduction

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I'm a graduate student, usually research on electromagnetics; recently changed to optics and photonics. The book of Bahaa was out in library, so I picked up this, wanted to give it a try.
One word - HORRIBLE.
Like what's been written in a previous review, the author just tried to pile up a bunch of hard-to-understand concepts in the book; every subsection of the book is relatively short; no detailed derivation, just results and then another results; I'm not a native English speaker, but never had a problem reading a well-written book, but the explanation in this book is just confusing. Even in my most familiar part - electromagnetic optics, a lot of the things in there are hard to understand for me; For the very basic stuff like "wavefront", the author didn't give a clear definition; useless figure illustrations.

After briefly going through the book, I have to read some other books to understand what it's talking about. Apparently not a good book for self-studying.

The cover looks cool, but NEVER JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER.

Just finishing up a semester-long, junior-level optics course using this book. It is absolutely horrid. The students often find the exposition incomprehensible (as do I). The authors frequently pull results out of thin air when a few lines of derivation/explanation would have made things clear. The problem sets are generally useless as they are routinely too difficult or too easy. The choice of topics is over-reaching. Care should be taken with fundamentals, then applications and variations on a theme can be introduced. This book makes the fundamentals a mystery, then piles on one topic after another before the end of the chapter. I can't think of anything good to say about this book. No real online support. Even the diagrams are frequently a head-scratching affair. It should be discontinued. What garbage. I wish my students could get their money back.