I am very pleased to have completed this Second Edition of Laser Fundamentals. The encouragement I have received over the past few years from readers as well as from my editors was sufficient to provide me with the enthusiasm to take on this new task. Writing the first edition was essentially a ten-year endeavor from first thoughts to the completed book. I thought I had a better way to explain to senior-level and first-year graduate students how lasers work. Apparently there were others who agreed with me, judging from comments I have received. Writing the second edition was an attempt to fill in some of the gaps, so to speak; not surprisingly, it took much more time than I had anticipated. Some of the areas of the First Edition were not as complete as I would have liked. There were also errors that had to be corrected. In addition, there have been advances– primarily in the areas of solid-state and semiconductor lasers– that needed to be included. I think the new edition addresses those issues pretty well. I suppose it's up to the readers to make that judgment.

Naturally one canyt take on a task like this without gleaning information from experts in the various fields of lasers. I offer special thanks to my colleagues at the School of Optics/CREOL at the University of Central Florida: Michael Bass, Glenn Boreman, Peter Delfyett, Dave Hagan, Hans Jenssen, Patrick Li Kam Wa, Alexandra Rapaport, Kathleen Richardson, Martin Richardson, Craig Siders, Eric Van Stryland, Nikolai Vorobiev, and Boris Zeldovich.