Best books for people changing fields?

H. A. Haus, Waves and Fields in Optoelectronics: Prentice-Hall, (1984). Hermann Haus was an extraordinary individual; this is a good candidate for your list.

R. H. Kingston, Optical Sources, Detectors, and Systems. New York: Academic Press, (1995). I don't know this book, and detector technology tends to go out of date, so you should look at it before adding it; but is your list perhaps a bit skimpy on books about detectors?

You know, at a certain size your list can turn into something more like a library catalog than what I think you're seeking, which is an annotated list of favorites, whose virtues and weakness are known and recognized.

If your list is going to be online, would you plan to allow readers to add amazon-style reviews and comments for each book separately?

They had negotiated a right to print with the original publishers - it was published in Bristol, U.K. by Adam Hilger in 1984, ISBN 0852743890. The Amazon copy is listed as published by Tayler and Francis in 1984 gives Kibble as the sole author.

It was on offer on their web-site until recently. It might still be available if you asked nicely.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

All three books, Gray & Meyer, Sedra & Smith and Jaeger and Blalock, are used in senior level electrical engineering college courses, cover pretty much the same material and are aimed at people doing their own discrete design. The main differences I spotted is Gray and Meyer has more information on noise in integrated circuits and nonlinear analog circuits. Unlike Gray & Meyer both Sedra & Smith and Jaeger and Blalock devote considerable space to designing CMOS and bipolar logic. I believe all three books are excellent books and will leave it up to you to decide which one to include in your bibliography,

Howard

I no longer have a copy of Corady's book. Yes, it is a bit heavy on numerical methods for mechanical calculators, although the same equations are still used today for high speed computers. I remember it having some interesting derivations useful for lens design. However, my memory is not what it used to be and it my be a bit dryer than I remember.

However, I do still have Twyman's book and it really is wonderful, especially from a historical perspective. To read it today makes one marvel at all the industry "secrets" that it gives away. I am not familiar with the book by Texereau. I'll have to check it out.

Thanks, all. This has been very helpful indeed.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Phil,

Linear Systems, Fourier Transforms, and Optics by Jack D. Gaskill Publisher: Wiley-Interscience (June 1978) The best Fourier optics book IMO

Introduction to Modern Optics by Grant R. Fowles An easy read that covers many physical optical theory

Polarized Light by Dennis Goldstein Since you don't have a polarization book listed

Best Wishes, another Phil

Thanks. What do you like about it especially?

I have this, but it didn't seem that compelling last time I looked at it. I'll have another squint.

I don't think I've ever even _seen_ a polarization book. Could be a bit specialized for the audience, perhaps?

Thanks.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

"Phil Hobbs" wrote

Military Handbook available from these sources, free of course.

(not the latest on the subject but still very good.)

Yes, I like Fowles also -- not the deepest or most detailed text on the theoretical side, but outstanding for giving physical insights into optics phenomena, and emphasizing that "optics" runs all the way down to microwave frequencies and lower.

Masud Mansuripur (University of Arizona), Classical Optics and its Applications: Pergamon Press, (2002).

A collection and extension of a large number of articles that Masud wrote over many years for Optics & Photonics News, each one giving a short illustrated tutorial on some fairly narrow and specific topic in optics, some elementary, some much more advanced, all readable and excellent as a starting point on that topic.

Received a five-star review in amazon -- and deserved it.

Thanks for the mention, but I didn't actually self-publish LASERS.

What I did do was "self-typeset" by preparing the entire manuscript as a TeX source file (not the figures or illustrations, however; it was still too early for that).

The finished manuscript was then turned over to the publisher, University Science Books in Sausalito, not as a typed ms (there never was one) but as a standard DEC-tape. Final copy editing was done on screen by the publisher's freelance copy editor (who was also a warlock), sitting at a DEC-20 timeshared terminal. May have been the first large professionally published book ever typeset using the newly emerging capabilities of TeX.

Actual typesetting was done with the irreplaceable assistance of Don Knuth, as a contract job for the publisher, using a professional-grade typesetting system Knuth had in the CS Dept basement at the time. Net result of getting away from conventional typesetting was a massive cost saving, especially for a modest-sales-volume technical book, making its price per page at the time it came out less than half the price per page of the average technical text at the time.

If anyone wants more gory details of how this was all done, they're in

Interesting, thanks--I misunderstood. Sorry for spreading disinformation. I'd never come across another book published by University Science Books, and had heard that USB was you.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Jack is a retired prof. of optics at Arizona so the book has an instructional slant to it. The book introduces Fourier mathematics, and then introduces its applications to optics, and continues into deeper sub-topics of Fourier optics. It serves as a great instructional book as well as a reference. I found it much more helpful than Goodman's book.

The Fowles book is great for quickly introducing new theory. It doesn't go very deep, but is a great launching point for many topics (as AES already pointed out).

As for the polarized light book, yes it is very specialized, on second thought probably too specialized.

Cheers, another Phil

Nope -- no financial or other involvement -- USB is the one-man-and-wife creation of a very nice guy, Bruce Armbruster, and has published a small collection containing some very distinguished books.

Cool. I'm a great fan of Joe Goodman's, but he falls into the now-usual trap of deriving Fourier optics from the Fresnel approximation plus a parabolic phase factor representing a lens. This yields the Fourier integral very neatly, but has left generations of students thinking that Fourier optics is inherently paraxial, and it isn't. I'll order a copy of Gaskill.

I have that one someplace too. IIRC it's a Dover and therefore cheap, plus I need more "one star" books on the list.

Once I have a chance to look at some of these, I'll stick a PDF of the bibliography on electrooptical.net and post a link here.

Thanks again,

Phil Hobbs

I honestly don't know, I haven't seen their book.

who

I think so. It has a chapter on basic radiometry and sticks to SI units based on CIE definitions to keep from getting tangled up in the mess of units that one usually runs into. It was also written by a EE instead of an optical engineer so he tends to keep it to the necessary info for somebody designing systems.

"Philip McCulloch" wrote

A decent and very useful little book (paperback), a classic in fact, on polarization (but not a treatise) is

Polarized Light by William A. Shurcliff & Stanley S. Ballard

It includes a lot in a few pages: various types of polarizers, Stokes Vectors, Poincare Sphere, Jones Calculus and Mueller Calculus etc.

Plus Lyot filters, Faraday effect, Photoelasticity...

Not new: 1964!

Amazon has one copy listed at $125 (I aways wonder about these prices).

"Charles Manoras" wrote

URL CORRECTED

In the section "Optics" I would suggest the following:

Fundamentals of Photonics by Bahaa E. A. Saleh, Malvin Carl Teich - Photonics - Wiley- Interscience (2007)

which has recently showed up in its new edition. I think this represents a good support for any scientist dealing with optical waveguides, fibers and related stuff. I like how the theory is presented, starting from ray optics to fourier optics and statistical optics, then presenting several applications.

Hope this helps

Max