Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Worst Book--But the Only Book, April 5, 2006
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.
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29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good for intuition, but uneven mathematically, October 28, 2001
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.
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Difficult to learn from., October 23, 1999
By A Customer
I used this book as an undergrad and found it difficult to learn from. I thought the book lacked enough examples and I often found myself reading a section several times and still not feeling confident that I understood it.
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