I am woundering about good undergrade text books. I have no clue where to start. Can anybody inform me on prefured authers for eather undergrade or grade level optics books?
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There aren't any good optics text books.
Hecht - the nearest to a good book, but only useful for modern optics (laser/fibre/diffraction) readqable but no good as a reference.
Born and Wolf - nobody can understand this, you look the answer up somewhere else and put the B+W reference to sound clever.
Jenkins+white - on it's 124th edition, but only because the first one predates Newton.
Pedrotti+pedrotti - a simpler version of B+W.
Modern optical engineering / Modern lens design - not enough detail to really create an optical design but not enough background to understand it.
There are also a bunch of tutorials on Zemax etc - usually only available for course on Zemax.
I like Predrotti + Pedrotti (Intro to optics), it has a fair bit of explanation and mathematical derivation. It certainly helped me during my undergrad years.
Available for free online is the Military Handbook of Optical Design, MIL-HDBK-141, which is a bit dense, but it is free and covers the material at a basic level.
Stone's "Radiation and Optics" is out of print, but your library may have a copy.
Hecht does seem to polarise opinions.
It doesn't have the rigour of B+W but it is readable or too wordy!
It doesn't cover geometric optics as well as 'modern optics'. Although one reviewer complained that it covers geometric optics at all - since no one needs to know that stuff these days, apparently it's all done by software!
I have the earlier Hecht+zacht edition - it seems to have doubled in size in recent editions.