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* About the Book

The text of this book was prepared using:

the TeX typesetting system created by Donald Knuth
the L^AT_EX document preparation macros by Leslie Lamport
the Emacs editor created by Richard Stallman and others
the Computer Modern typeface also by Donald Knuth

The figures were prepared using:

the Idraw graphics system by John Vlissides
the Helvetica typeface by Max Miedinger (with Edouard Hoffmann)

The figures were drawn by hand, line by line, using Idraw. That is, with the obvious exception of figure 14.1, they were not scanned in, and they are not ``clip art''.

* About the Web Site

Since 1996 this book has been available on the World Wide Web. The HTML was prepared from the L^AT_EX sources using H^EV^EA, plus some custom post-processing.

If you are having trouble downloading or viewing this book, please read the ``troubleshooting'' section below. For other questions or comments, you can send email to <jsd@monmouth.com>.

Many readers have provided valuable feedback about the parts they liked and the parts that needed fixing. Many sections were written in response to readers' requests for more information on certain topics.

* Configuring and Troubleshooting your Browser

When viewing this book there are a couple of things that could go wrong:

Every so often I hear from somebody who observes that one or more of the chapters is truncated: it just stops in mid-sentence. This happens because of a problem in your web browser, probably a memory shortage. If this happens to you, you should try the following things:
- Hit the "Reload" button on your browser. This probably won't help, but it's easy to do, so you might as well try it.
- Clear your browser's disk-cache and memory-cache. On some browsers this involves clicking on Edit — Preferences — Advanced — Cache — Clear. This will probably do the trick. While you're at it, make sure the caches have a reasonable size (at least 3000 kB memory, 5000 kB disk).
- Terminate and restart your browser.
- Get rid of some of the other processes running on your computer and try again.
- Make sure your computer's virtual memory system is configured properly, and is using a disk that has plenty of free space. Delete some junk files if necessary. Try again.
- Shut down and restart your computer, then try again.
- Install a current version of the browser, then try again. The older versions seem to be much less robust.
If all that doesn't work, consult your local computer guru. There is nothing I can do to help, other than rewriting the book, and I'm not going to do that.
In your browser, the following should look like Greek letters: ``gp''. If they look like ``gamma'' and ``pi'' then all is well. If they look like Roman letters such as ``g'' and ``p'' then your browser has not properly loaded the symbol fonts. To fix this please refer to the font-fixing notes.

* Search This Site

Coming soon.

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