Rating: 
Summary: The most vile optics textbook available
Review: I loathed this book when I was an undergraduate student, more so than any
textbook I've ever encountered before or since. And what do you know?
Reading it again, sixteen years later, I loathe it just as much.
This was the book that instilled in me a hatred of everything and anything
to do with optics, a hatred that persists to this day.
It is the very fact that I hate optics so much that had me reading this
book again. I figured that if I was to try to learn optics again, this
time in a more pleasant fashion, perhaps the best way to start was to
return to where it all began, to go over Hecht & Zajac again to see what
they say, evaluate it in the light of my older, more knowledgeable me, and
remember essentially the points they cover for comparison when I read a
better (ie any other whatsoever) text.
Just what is it that makes this book so very bad?
Any textbook can have convoluted physical explanations that make no sense.
Likewise any textbook can include plodding mathematical explanations that
get so worn down explaining basic and trivial points that by the time you
reach their end you've forgotten what the goal was.
Any textbook author can devote no time whatsoever to such pedagogical
basics as making sure the material is ordered so that everything builds
on what came before, and that a thorough overview is presented before the
details are covered, of just what we are about to do and why.
Of course H&Z cover these basics with aplomb, but they manage to include
two far more vicious pathologies. The first, usually only found in quantum
mechanics books, is the historical pathology; they are so in love with the
history of optics that they are unwilling to ever explain anything in
modern (which usually means maxwellian) terms when they could explain it
in some alternative fashion involving some historical picture from 1820 or
1840 or whatever. The result is that instead of a coherent description of
optics as maxwell's equations followed by a long sequence of teasing out
the consequences of the equations, we see a constant hodge-podge of
different theoretical models throughout the book, each appropriate to its
particular problem and little else. Don't get me wrong; I like history as
much as (probably rather more so) than the next physicist, but I want a
textbook on optics to teach me the optics; I'll learn the history from my
history of optics textbook. We don't teach mechanics or heat or EM this
way (for the most part) and for good reason.
The second H&Z pathology is specific to their text alone, and it is that
they cannot get it through their thick skulls that they are writing a
general optics textbook, not a (very poor) reference manual, not an
experimentalist's handbook. The text is littered with bizarre asides about
how to view the issue just discussed in some variant fashion, the point of
which, to anyone who is not an expert, is completely mystifying; it would
be cruel of me to say so, but I'll do it anyway --- these inclusions seem
very much to come across as a form of insecure boasting, a way of saying,
"you think you're better than me? you think so? well what do you know
about xyz's paper in 1963? do you know how to modify the theory of
geometrical optics so as to give results just like standard diffraction
theory? no --- I thought so."
If you can, in any way whatsoever, avoid this book. Read anything else at
all to learn about optics.
Rating: 
Summary: Loooong....
Review: A nice book that covers a lot of material, but it is rather elementary (and far too long). For those physicists that know some mathematics (and that should include all of you), a much better, more concise alternative is Bekefi and Barret's "Electromagnetic Vibrations, Waves, and Radiation."
Rating: 
Summary: Loooong....
Review: A nice book that covers a lot of material, but it is way too long. For those physicists that know some mathematics (and that should include all of you), a much better, more concise alternative is Bekefi and Barret's "Electromagnetic Vibrations, Waves, and Radiation." This book does a good job of placing some of the physics in context, and the publishers have put together a very clean book.
Rating:
Summary: Too much fancy Talk, Not enough Examples
Review: As an undergraduate I find this book incredibly confusing. Hecht seems to take pleasure in using fancy words and hyped up sentences when simpler statements will do. Instead of deriving equations by first starting with intuiton, then using substitution of previous results etc, he prefers to talk his way into derivations using sometimes page long reasoning. Sometimes it's Ok to let the equations speak for themselves. If this is considered the standard in optics textbooks I am afraid of opening the mess that other textbooks must be.
Rating:
Summary: Good for intuition, but uneven mathematically
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: The Best Introductory Optics Book I've Seen
Review: Hecht is a master of explanation and he treats virtually every aspect of optics in this book. You can do no better for physical insight. For worked problems, I recommend getting the Schaum's Outline by Hecht ... They compliment each other quite nicely.
Rating:
Summary: worst text I ever used
Review: Hecht is the worst text I used as an undergrad fro the following reasons.
1) He is too verbose. His explanations of phenomena could easily be more brief and a lot more clear. Some people like to hear themselves speak; Hecht likes to hear himself write. If you want a clear description of what is going on then Pedrotti is a much better text.
2) You will often find entire sections devoted to the history of optics. This is not bad and I rather enjoyed them. However, they are interspersed between critical sections that one really ought to be drawing connections between. There is nothing wrong with a stand-alone history of optics chapter or even with putting the historical development in the beginning or at the end of the chapter.
2.5) His current style makes this text useless as a quick reference. If I want to read about a Fourier transform of a triangle function, I want to be able to flip to the index, see a page number, go to it, and get the relevant information. I do not trudge through why FT is such a useful tool, transforms of gaussian and cylindrical functions, convolution, the dirac delta function, Fraunhoffer difraction, and correlation to find the ten lines that tell you what the result is. There is a figure a few pages later that gives you the same information as well. Why it is not on the same page as the relevant text I will never know. The exercise took 20 mins and principally because you have to read through the text to make sure he didn't mention on one line it under some random heading (which he did...it shows up under correlation...because its obvious to look under there apparently. There is no entry for triangle functions under the index, either by itself or under FT...you will however find an entry for Charles Wheatstone)
One might argue that if I needed such information I could use Schaums (also by Hecht) but the point is every other textbook I have used (and I have used a lot of them) facilitates information retrieval EXCEPT Hecht.
3) Even if he is too verbose, and includes unnecessary information, what is happening really ought to be clear from looking at an equation, as these are the most economical way of describing phenomena...after all thats why we use them. Hecht's equations use archaic notation and are not rigorously derived in most cases. They are spread out over the chapter (or chapters) which is a problem because he makes cross references all over the place. A summary of essential formulae at the end of a chapter would go a long way towards addressing this shortcoming.
4) Some of Hecht's figures (cartoons if you like) are too busy and too much is going on in any one to make them easily understandable. His captions are frequently uninformative. I did like that he has actual pictures all over the place, and in this respect Hecht does beat out other optics textbooks. However, negative infinity plus one does not change his score a whole lot. Optics is a subject principally learnt in lab, and the pictures help in bridging the gap between class and lab or theory and experiment.
5) The binding is shoddy.
In summary, this book sucks.
I felt strongly enough about it to compose this diatribe and if any of you want to argue about it, feel free to mail me.
Rating:
Summary: simply the best in optics
Review: Hi: During my study ( I do have a master in Phyyics ) I bought a ton of books. Eugen Hechts Optics is one I read front to back and understood every single concept in it. I was always pretty bad in my courses only Hecht helped me to an A. This is the book to read for linear Optics.
Rating:
Summary: We are recommending this book for UVM
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: The optical choise
Review: I came across Hecths books on optics when I was working with my college, dr. Waage Skrýmslið, on a phenomenon known as Hornarfjarðarljósbjögun (a.k.a. SR-Mjöl). I was doing some research at the library when I came across that book. I stole it from the library brought it back to our dr. Skrýmslið lab. We fought for the book for days and finally decided to share it. The next few weeks we even slept together, with only that book to seperate us. The book came in handy aswell doing our research and we solved the Hornarfjarðarljósbognunar problem (see our books "Hornafjarðaljósbjögun, the problem scoped and solved", "How to get to Hornafjörður without meeting SRJ" and "Hornafjarðarljósbognun for experts".
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