Lucio Crivellari is Associate Researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Tenerife and at the INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, Italy. He has previously held positions as an ESA External Fellow at the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon (1982–83) and European Union Senior Fellow Human Capital and Mobility at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (1994–95). His research focuses on radiative transfer and stellar atmosphere theory. Sergio Simón-Díaz is Staff Researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Tenerife. He is mainly involved in the observation and analysis of massive stars and he has authored more than a hundred refereed papers. At present he is leading the IACOB project, a long-term observational project aimed at providing an overview of the main physical properties of Galactic massive O- and B-type stars to be used to improve our current understanding of the current theories of stellar atmospheres, winds, interiors and evolution of massive stars. Maria Jesús Arévalo is Associate Professor at Universidad de la Laguna, Tenerife and researcher at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. She was also the Head of Graduate Studies Division of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in 2016–17. Her research focuses on binary stars.

'The bulk of this volume consists of highly specialized and rigorously presented tutorials on this theory and on how to employ it, suitable for readers who are already professional specialists or advanced graduate students in physics or astrophysics, assuming strong mathematical preparation … This will be a welcome acquisition for graduate-level and research libraries with collections in physics, astrophysics, and planetary science.' S. P. Maran, Choice

• Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. The physical grounds of radiative transfer Lucio Crivellari; 2. Fundamental physical aspects of radiative transfer Artemio Herrero; 3. Numerical methods in radiative transfer Olga Atanacković; 4. Stellar atmosphere codes Mats Carlsson; 5. Radiative transfer in the (expanding) atmospheres of early type stars, and related problems Joachim Puls; 6. Phenomenology and physics of late-type stars Maria Bergemann, Camilla Juul Hansen and Timothy C. Beers; 7. Modeling the atmospheres of ultracool dwarfs and extrasolar planets Mark S. Marley.