An accessible textbook for students and practitioners of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics. It will be useful for scientists working with lasers. The book comes with an extensive freely downloadable software package and many colourful and animated illustrations. Additional materials are available for instructors.

Optically Polarized Atoms is addressed at upper-level undergraduate and graduate students involved in research in atomic, molecular, and optical Physics. It will also be useful to researchers practicing in this field. It gives an intuitive, yet sufficiently detailed and rigorous introduction to light-atom interactions with a particular emphasis on the symmetry aspects of the interaction, especially those associated with the angular momentum of atoms and light. The book will enable readers to carry out practical calculations on their own, and is richly illustrated with examples drawn from current research topics, such as resonant nonlinear magneto-optical effects. The book comes with a software package for a variety of atomic-physics calculations and further interactive examples that is freely downloadable from the book's web page, as well as additional materials (such as power-point presentations) available to instructors who adopt the text for their courses.

The recently published book "Optically Polarized Atoms" by Marcis Auzinsh, Dmitry Budker and Simon M. Rochester will be a unique and valuable addition to the library of anyone -- students or established researchers[...]It provides a rich mine of information about atomic physics that is hard to find elsewhere. I intend to keep a copy on my shelf of favorite physics books.