Best Practical Retro Intro
Jacobs put this text together in WW II (published 1943) "to give a course in applied optics under the Engineering,Science,and Management War Training program at George Washington University". * He was then Senior Physicist, U.S. Naval Observatory and also Lecturer in Applied Optics at GWU.
It is an excellent intro to practical design of optical instruments and components such as lenses, binoculars, telescopes, rangefinders and periscopes. The approach is primarily geometric optics. Some of it is tedious: e.g. thick lens considerations, which were skipped in 1959 when I took my "Intermediate Optics" course using Jenkins & White for a text - it was there , the profs just did not cover it, in favor of the physical optics topics like diffraction.
The technical reader would need to recall the optics portion of his first introductory course in physics to follow the equations that Jacobs invokes (he usually does not derive them). But the book is a delight to browse for insights into practical design: e.g. he informs us (p. 205) that it has been observed that the general limit of human stereoscopic vision depth perception is about 500 yards. He then goes on to develop an equation for the improvement to be realized by using a binocular with magnification "M" and increased effective interpupilary distance - baselength. For the WWII U.S. Army standard issue 6X30 binoculars the new limit would be 5000 yards, a tenfold improvement.
He regularly interjects considerations of practical mechanical design and manufacturing considerations. For example, early on, on page 6, re the necessity of optical axis alignment, he states that "Some optical manufacturers are distressingly lax in this respect".
This is the kind of treats that are in the book for technically trained and general optical instrument readers. It does not contain modern methods such as computer codes or Fourier optics.
I bought a beautiful, like-new copy from Aurelius Books for around ten dollars on Alibris in February 2008.
*Quoted from the Preface of the book