[.ca] Optics (ISBN 0805385665)

bad book!!! wasting time!!!:
it is difficult to learn from. NO examples are found and I often found myself reading a section several times and still not feeling confident that I understood it.

Too much fancy Talk, Not enough Examples:
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.

Clear:
I like this book. It explains things well. It's very well written and easy to read. It has a lot of data, well organized. However, I think students ought to be disturbed by the outrageous $108 price tag. I happened by accident to have purchased instead a brand-new version of the special "low cost" edition - intended for distribution only *outside* the US and Canada - that, even with the secondary dealer markup, cost me under thirty bucks - and still presumeably left them a profit. Feeling ripped off yet?

A great book!:
I used this book in my undergraduate optics class. It was mostly self-taught and we met to ask questions and turn in homework. I found this book challenging but not impossible. The text is very well written and the end of chapter problems didn't require a Ph.D. to solve. I learned the most from any of my classes from this book (partly due to the teaching style of the professor). I highly recommend it if you want to learn optics.

A good book if you're not in a hurry...:
The best thing about Hecht's book are the long and thorough discussions about every topic. This makes the book very adequate for self studying. On the other hand, it can be very incovenient if you're using to book to study for your exams (as I did). So I do recomend Hecht as a first reading in Optics, but be sure that you're not in a hurry...