Carlos A. Murillo - Böcker

ince the second edition of this book there has been so much published in the ? eld that Stwo points seemed clear. One was a sense that a new, up-to-date monograph was needed. The other was the reluctance of two or even three people to undertake the daunting task of covering all the ground. Our response was to call on others to help and, thus, to produce the present, multiauthored volume. Each of the contributing authors was in a position to write - thoritatively, from hands-on research experience. We are con? dent that this has led to a better book than the three of us would have produced. As always in a book where different chapters are written by different authors, there is some variation in style and we chose not to try to smooth it all out. In every chapter the objective has been to be comprehensive, if not encyclopedic. Putting it a little differently, we, and the other authors, have aimed to mention all pertinent literature references, although the amount of emphasis accorded each paper necessarily varies. Since the volume of literature to cover is now so large, a few topics that might have been included (or were in the second edition) have been omitted or are covered only in limited detail.