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Rating: 
Summary: An outstanding guide to some very tough terrain
Review: This book will help a lot of people, especially students and young researchers in optics, engineering science, and experimental physics, to stay out of a lot of trouble.
I predict that many students and professors are going to be very grateful to Mark Johnson!*Photodetection and Measurement* is all about how to make optical measurements work *in real life*. Starting from an elementary level, it takes you from the source, through the optical system, the crucial front end amplifier, the analogue signal processing and digitizing. I especially liked the "TRY IT!" sections--guided tours that will give you an excellent intuitive and quantitative understanding of how lock-in amplifiers, frequency compensation, fibre coupling, and many other things work. Lab work and simple analytical calculations generate intuition faster than anything. There's a detailed section on lock-ins, with lots of hands-on stuff to show that they work just like bandpass filters plus downconverters. My favourite part is the section on turbidity measurements--the author was head of the R&D team at a large water utility for some years, so he knows this stuff cold. He gives many different methods methods of avoiding or compensating for fouling, and of improving accuracy, e.g. rejecting background by modulating the sample absorption using wedge-shaped sample cells. This is typical of the thoroughly practical attitude Johnson displays throughout--it's always the things you haven't thought about that will bite you, and he's usually thought about them. There are a thousand good tricks here. If you're starting out with a photodiode in one hand, a data acq system in the other, and no idea how to connect the one to the other, this is definitely your book.
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