Customer Reviews

Photonic Crystals: The Road from Theory to Practice

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

 

 

Taken by itself, it isn't a bad book BUT most (80%) of the content is just *reprinted journal articles* which, if you work/study anywhere with decent journal access, you can get for FREE. Just look up Joannopoulos' major papers. The other 20% of the book is covered in more detail in his other book, Photonic Crystals:Molding the Flow of Light.

And this is not even mentioning the absolutely outrageous price that the publisher wants for this miniscule tract. It looks like it was just photocopied (poorly - you can even see where the toner didn't distribute properly) and bound. Some of the graphs and illustrations were meant to be shown in color in the journals and are, of course, illegible in black and white.

I recommend buying the other book.

This book is very costly and not worth either the money or the time you spend reading it. It's a collection of journal articles that you can get free if your institution subscribes to common physics and optics journals. They have added a badly written introduction and conclusion, and there is absolutely no coherent presentation as it jumps from topic to topic in different papers.

(Note: I have used the Kids review option because I didnt want to take the trouble of finding my password, signing in ... I am a researcher in the area of nonlinear photonics.)

Recently I had been working on simulation of light propagation in photonic crystals, and found that many materials (text, papers, etc) are difficult for beginners, especially non-physics majors like myself (I'm a computer science people).

[Note that this book itself does not state that it is for beginners, but the tone of the text itself said it all.]

This book fills in the gap nicely. It has a good introduction topics and good explanation, i.e., english rather than mathematical formula, for otherwise rather difficult things. A lot of things, including computational model, are introduced in the text (even I think the computational model section is a little bit shallow). Note that this book might missed out some recent advancement like nonlinear waveguide. However, taking into account that this book is rather for beginners of this rapidly-changing field, it is fine with me.

Cons::
This book has some cons, however. First, it is a little bit pricy. Considering that it is only 154 pages long and pricing at 125$, it is almost $1/page. And at this price, you would expect it to be in full colors with good quality paper (like Joannopoulos' previous "Photonic Crystals: Molding the Flow of Light" book). However, a copy I recieved has rather bad quality paper and only in monochrome. And for this reason, I had lowered the rate of this otherwise a 5-stars book.

This book will be very useful for future researcher in the emerging field oh photonic crystal.