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Title: Fast-paced and in-depth
Review: Paraphrasing J.W. Goodman in his Fourier Optics, E.L.O'Neill helped consummate the marriage between communication theory and optics.This book is not an introduction. In under 200 pages, It covers geometrical, fourier and statistical optics without patiently deriving the formulae in small steps. It feels to me like a train ride over a long distance, with many stops where the conductor points at important scenes and tells good stories that I did not know before, even for the places I previously visited. For example, page 26-27 talks about contrast reversal in a most direct fashion in real space, much more elucidating than treatments in frequency space only.The range of the topics in this book is close to 50% of combined (Warren Smith's Modern Optical Engineering + Joseph Goodman's Fourier Optics & Statistical Optics), the depth is about 80% of that combo, while the thickness is only 10%.
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