The ongoing success of the earlier versions of this book motivated us to prepare a new edition. While modern techniques of nuclear magnetic resonance spectr- copy and mass spectrometry have changed the ways of data acquisition and greatly extended the capabilities of these methods, the basic parameters, such as chemical shifts, coupling constants, and fragmentation pathways remain the same. However, since the amount and quality of available data has considerably increased over the years, we decided to prepare a signifcantly revised manuscript. It follows the same basic concepts, i. e. , it provides a representative, albeit limited set of reference data 13 1 for the interpretation of C NMR, H NMR, IR, mass, and UV/Vis spectra. We also 19 31 added a new chapter with reference data for F and P NMR spectroscopy and, in the chapter on infrared spectroscopy, we newly refer to important Raman bands. Since operating systems of computers become outdated much faster than printed media, we decided against providing a compact disk with this new edition. The limited versions of the NMR spectra estimation programs can be downloaded from the home page of the developing company (www. upstream. ch/support/book_do- loads. html). We thank numerous colleagues who helped us in many different ways to c- plete the manuscript. We are particularly indebted to Dr. Dorothée Wegmann for her expertise with which she eliminated many errors and inconsistencies of the earlier versions. Special thanks are due to Prof.
