This collective 620-page volume brings together many of the fundamental constituents of fiber optical communications and sensing, together with specifics in a range of applications. It turns out that this is the 2015 second edition of the book (the original dates back to 1992), with no explicit changes listed or identified. For example, the individual authored chapters each have a bibliography with most references dating back to the early 1990s. So don’t expect to see many developments since then reported, notably dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), which dominates today’s networks, and intrinsic fiber optic Bragg gratings for sensors as deployed in gyroscopes as well as many other uses. Rayleigh, Raman, or Brillouin scattering are barely addressed.

Nevertheless, this volume crystallizes the main achievements of the field then called photonics. The chapters are very well written and each topic is explained at length, providing comprehensive content that is still of value for educational purposes. Also, some of the chapters include descriptions of short experimental set-ups, allowing students to replicate them and explain their results from the basics in the book.

Part 1 covers fundamentals of optical waveguides and nonlinear optics, with simple characterization methods and elements of fabrication and integration. Part 2 covers laser sources, detectors, and simple modulation schemes, with some examples of devices; this part is one of those showing the biggest lags to state-of-the-art technology. Part 3 is on intensity modulated and interferometric optical fiber sensors, with the corresponding simple signal processing, as well as basic detection schemes linked to multiplexing; it does not address some guidelines in fiber optic sensor fabrication and installation, which is always very tricky. A short index covers the complete volume.

Today, this volume can only serve in whole or in parts for initial undergraduate teaching on photonics, provided the subsequent course structure takes up thereafter the missing fundamentals and technologies. It may also inspire engineers in industry for self-study, as they may be exposed to systems integration tasks.