Originally posted by Ropuchy I actually like maths, just not the stuff they teach in school unfortunately. Do you know of any more technical and to-the-point sorts of books with less reading, or would 'Optics' by Hecht still be a good place to start?
Depends on your math level... Liking math and having completed college-level math classes are two different things. If you want to understand the math underlying the physics, you need to be comfortable with differential equations, solving special functions like Bessel functions (that one is more for fiber optics, but still), using matrices, calculus, etc. Not saying you can't, I really have no idea, but I do know that for a lot of people, what I just wrote is gibberish.
Hecht strikes a good balance. There's an older book, probably called "optics" also, by Mueller. fcuses on matrices a lot (Jones matrices, in fact) so might be easier for some. Introduction to optical design is pretty good, but quite technical, I wouldn't use it as a starting point. There's also the user guide to the Oslo optical design software, it's VERY technical but that user guide is in fact an optical design textbook. A college-level introduction to optics might be "Field and wave electromagnetic" by Cheng, quite good, gives you what you need to know to start learning bout optical design, but of course quite a lot of math.