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Title: Optics (4th Edition)
ISBN: 0805385665
Author:
Eugene Hecht
Publicate Date: 2001-08-12
Publish: 2001-08-12
List Price: $131.40
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $103.48
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $94.99
Amazon Merchant Price: $105.12
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| Customer Review: |
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1: 4th edition and counting
I recommend this as the first optics book you ever read. Emphasis on conceptual understanding, carried by excellent and profuse illustrations and description, allow the reader a deeper understanding of what's going on; mathematical descriptions stay shallow.
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2: The worst textbook i've ever used
Of all the textbooks i have ever used at university (and as a fourth year student there have been quite a lot) this is simply the worst by far. Unlike the other physics textbooks i have used which were good at clarifying material, i found myself more confused after reading this book. Material i understood perfectly well at the lecture become suddenly incomprehendable when reading this awful book. Avoid it.
Having shelled out money at the beginning of the semester for this book, i ended up using other optics books from the library all semester. Do NOT buy this book.
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3: Perfect
An outstandingly good quality book, both in content and in the book itself. Very satisfied.
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4: Wonderful
As an introductory book teaching classical (and some modern) optics, this wonderful book is difficult to beat.
It prepares you remarkably well for any direction in optics you then want to set off in. The explanations are mostly crystal-clear, crafted with great care. Lots of words and diagrams, not too much math, but enough math to facilitate useful calculations.
An excellent under-graduate text, to my mind, the best available today.
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5: Good content, organized in a frustrating way
This is a fairly good textbook trapped in an inexcusably bad layout. I've worked my way through about half the textbook now and there are several sections which contain lots of helpful figures. However, there seems to have been almost no effort made to put the text on the same or facing page along with the figures, so you spend a lot of your time on these sections reading a paragraph, jumping ahead to find the figure, going back to read the next paragraph, again jumping ahead for that figure, and so on. It's bad enough when the figures are sparse, but when they are as dense as they are in some sections and as critical as they are to understanding the material, it's hard to stomach. As a result, I find that this book wastes a lot of my time. This is in the Third Edition, so you could hope things have changed, but I wouldn't bet a hundred bones on it.
Also, to reiterate what another reviewer said, there are subjects like Fourier Optics which are spread out throughout the book more than is necessary. This makes it a fairly poor reference, since you sometimes have to dig up separate chunks of material in a piecemeal fashion.
Still, for the level of the book, I am struggling to find something better. Born and Wolf is pretty good, but it's more of a graduate level text. Judging by the quality of the material available, textbook authorship must be harder than it seems.
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