Fundamentals of Optics

by Francis A. Jenkins, Harvey Elliott White, Harvey E. White, et al.

Book Overview

Fundamentals of Optics is one the best classic textbooks of physics. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0070323283
• ISBN13: 9780070323285
• Release Date: January 1957
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Length: 637 Pages
• Weight: 0.23 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The best general book on optics

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.

A good basic book on optics

I had first read the book in college (Purdue). I was a physics major. It is a good basic book about optics. I now have a ten year old asking questions, and I use the book as a reference to explain things to my son. My copy of the book is the third edition. I am purchaseing the fourth edition because it contains the topic of Scherlerion optics. Sorry for the misspellings.

It's a good background in Optics.

This is a good book. It provides me the basic background in optical engineering. Actually, this book belongs to my advisor. He gave me to read and understand the basic idea of optics and it works. Not only did I get the basic idea of this kind of field, but I also have some advanced ideas how to deal with Optic in reality. Someone may say that this book is too easy for him/her, but would you think about it a little bit that how you could achieve something without the basic idea?