Schaum's Outline of Optics

This is a great book for somebody who wants to learn basics and get a feeling about optics. Helped me with the exam too.

I used this book as a supplement for a course in Physical Optics, mainly to get practice in solving problems. I found the chapters on Polarization and Diffraction very useful. This book helped me get a better grade in this course. This book does not cover the topics like Jones and Coherence Matrix and Stokes vector. However these topics are covered well in the same author's Optics text. BTW, The Optics text is also very good. Solving problems in this book and then approaching the text gives a much better understanding of Optics. This book does not cover Poincare' sphere, which is also an important topic for which we cant find material anywhere except our Professor's lecture notes. Overall, this book is a must if you are taking any Optics course or the GRE physics text or if you just want to master the basics of Optics.

Its a good book to work problems in congunction with a regular text book. The practical side is limited for engineering purposes. Smith or Fischer is a better book. I am a practicing engineer, so I look at stuff from what works in real world. It would have been a very good book when I was in grad school (many moons ago:).

This Schaum's outline is better than the expensive textbook by the same author on the same subject in many ways, and in my opinion stands alone as a guide on optics. It gets to the meat of optics via solving problems that range from simple to difficult, which is particularly attractive to engineers learning or reviewing this subject. To me, the only chapters that seemed a bit confusing were the first two on wave motion and on electromagnetic waves and photons. For that material you may need to consult another source. From that point onward, however, the outline couldn't be any better. The outline even has a chapter that introduces Fourier optics. This outline would make an excellent review or supplement for someone taking a course in Photonics that uses Saleh's "Fundamentals of Photonics". That textbook has virtually no solved problems in it whatsoever, and the first third of the book follows the material covered in this outline nicely.

Hecht is one of the premier instructors and authors on the subject of optics and his contribution to Schaum's is no exception! I used this book to teach myself the fundamental's of optics while working in an applied physics laboratory. Very clearly presented material