In the preface to the second edition of this book we stressed that we had written the text in the hope of helping those trainee eye surgeons who were preparing to take their basic professional examinations.

We assumed that the optics they had learned at school had long since been forgotten, and we therefore set out to explain the subject from first principles.

Our aim was to keep the text logical and simple and we used diagrams liberally to complement the written word. These diagrams themselves were simplified so that they could be both easily memorised and reproduced – even under the stress of examination conditions.

Throughout the book we emphasised the clinical relevance of each topic and we hoped that this approach would allow readers to understand better the optical problems experienced by many of their patients...