Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book has stood the test of time as one of the classic textbooks of physics. It ranks up there with Reitz, Milford & Christy ("Foundations of Electromagnetic Theory") and Symon ("Mechanics") as one of the most-used textbooks in the upper-division undergraduate physics curriculum, and for very good reasons. While not detailed enough for graduate-level treatments (the standard in this case is Born and Wolf, "Principles of Optics"), as its title states, "Fundamentals of Optics" starts with the assumption that the reader knows absolutely nothing about optics and goes from there. Without getting bogged down in daunting mathematics (see "Principles of Optics" for that!), "Fundamentals of Optics" covers ALL of the main points of optics in a very consistently clear and concise manner, so much so that, after twenty years in the business of optical engineering, this book is STILL the first book I go to when I need to review a fundamental optical phenomenon (for actual optical engineering, I still rely on Smith, "Modern Optical Engineering"). Interestingly, some of the more complex aspects of Optics are handled better as chapters in "Fundamentals of Optics" than they are in whole books devoted to these topics! For example, the chapters in "Fundamentals of Optics" that deal with crystal optics and birefringence are pretty much the best treatments that I have ever found that actually explain the phenomenology without getting lost in the finer details. I refer to these chapters all the time in my work with solid-state lasers.
This is a great book, and you won't regret owning it.
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