The single most useful thing to know before buying anything on this subject is what each book assumes you already have. Fiber optics is taught at three completely separate levels — as a trade skill, as an undergraduate physics topic, and as graduate electrical engineering — and the covers do not tell you which one you are holding. A technician's survey and a research monograph on nonlinear propagation both say fiber optics on the spine.
A disambiguation first, because this path contains both of them: Jeff Hecht and Eugene Hecht are different people. Jeff Hecht is a science journalist who writes accessible books about fiber and lasers. Eugene Hecht is a physicist whose Optics is a standard undergraduate textbook. They are unrelated, and mixing them up will get you a book at the wrong level.
No maths required
Understanding fiber optics by Jeff Hecht is the industry survey: connectors, splices, attenuation budgets, what the components do and why systems are built the way they are, all without calculus. It is the right first book for anyone approaching from a networking or installation background. Introduction to fiber optics by John Crisp is lighter still and more practical, aimed squarely at technicians. Reading both is unnecessary; pick by whether you want breadth or hands-on framing.
City of light is Jeff Hecht's history of how fiber communication was invented, from Victorian light pipes through Charles Kao's 1966 attenuation argument to the transatlantic cables. No mathematics at all, and it makes the engineering choices in the technical books legible.
The physics you actually need
Optics by Eugene Hecht is the foundation, and there is no way around it if you want to understand rather than operate. It assumes calculus and some fluency with complex exponentials, and it covers interference, diffraction, polarisation and waveguides properly. Work through the relevant chapters before attempting anything below this line.
Fundamentals of photonics by Bahaa Saleh and Malvin Teich is the standard senior-and-graduate text for the whole field: ray, wave, beam, Fourier and photon optics, then lasers, detection, modulation and fiber. It assumes multivariable calculus, Fourier analysis, Maxwell's equations and an introductory quantum course. It is large, well-written and the book most photonics graduate students actually own.
Communication systems
Optical fiber communications by Gerd Keiser is the gentler of the two systems textbooks — more explanatory, more space given to components and measurement, suitable for a first course after basic electromagnetics. Fiber-Optic Communication Systems by Govind P. Agrawal is denser and more mathematical, deriving pulse propagation and system limits from the wave equation, and it is the one to read if you intend to design links rather than specify them. Optical networks by Rajiv Ramaswami and Kumar Sivarajan sits a layer above both: wavelength division multiplexing, network architecture, routing and protection. It is more architecture than physics, and the network-design content dates faster than anything else on the path because line rates and standards keep moving. The physics in the other books does not date.
Lasers
Principles of lasers by Orazio Svelto is the compact, teachable treatment: rate equations, gain, resonators, laser types, at a level a physics or engineering senior can follow. Lasers by Anthony E. Siegman is the encyclopedia — Gaussian beams, resonator theory, and coherence handled at a depth nothing else matches. It is a reference to consult across a career rather than a book to read straight through, and it assumes real comfort with electromagnetics.
Research level
Photonics by Amnon Yariv and Pochi Yeh covers optical electronics in modern communications at graduate electrical-engineering level: waveguides, modulators, quantum-well devices, noise. Nonlinear Fiber Optics by Agrawal is the standard research monograph on the nonlinear Schrödinger equation as it applies to fiber — self-phase modulation, solitons, four-wave mixing — and it assumes you have already worked through his systems book. Photonic crystals by John D. Joannopoulos and colleagues develops periodic dielectric structures using band-structure methods borrowed from solid-state physics, so a solid-state course helps enormously. Silicon Photonics Design by Lukas Chrostowski and Michael Hochberg is the practical outlier: it is about actually laying out and fabricating integrated photonic circuits, with process constraints and measurement, and it is the book for someone heading into a foundry run rather than a lecture theatre.
Pick your level honestly and read up from there rather than starting where you would like to be; the complete sequence is on the path, and more engineering paths sit under Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: How to Learn Fiber Optics and Photonics from Books, in Order.
