About the accompanying CD-ROM The CD-ROM that comes with this book contains the entire hyperlinked text in Adobe Acrobat format. It also includes Adobe's Acrobat Reader software, enabling you to read that format; the versions provided cover major industry platforms. If you do not already have Acrobat Reader on your computer, you can install it by following the instructions. The author and the publisher make no representations as to any property of Acrobat and associated tools; the Acrobat Reader is simply provided as a service to readers of this book, and any Acrobat questions should be directed to Adobe. You may also check with Adobe about any versions of the Reader that may have appeared after the book. To get started with the CD-ROM, open the Acrobat file README.pdf in the OOSC_2 directory, which will direct you to the table of contents and the index. You can only open that file under Acrobat Reader; if the Reader has not been installed on your computer, examine instead the plain-text version in the file readme.txt in the top-level directory. The instructions also appear at the end of this book. The presence of an electronic version will be particularly useful to readers who want to take advantage of the thousands of cross-references present in this book (see "A Book- Wide Web", page viii). Although for a first sequential reading you will probably prefer to follow the paper version, having the electronic form available on a computer next to the book alllows you to follow a link once in a while without having to turn pages back and forth. The electronic form is particularly convenient for a later reading during which you may wish to explorelinks more systematically. All links (cross-references) appear in blue in the Acrobat form, as illustrated twice above (but not visible in the printed version). To follow a link, just click on the blue part. If the reference is to another chapter, the chapter will appear in a new window. The Acrobat Reader command to come back to the previous position is normally Control- minus-sign (that is, type - while holding down the CONTROL key). Consult the on-line Acrobat Reader documentation for other useful navigational commands. Bibliographical references also appear as links, such as [Knuth 1968], in the Acrobat form, so that you can click on any of them to see the corresponding entry in the bibliography of appendix E. The CD-ROM also contains: * Library components providing extensive material for Appendix A. * A chapter from the manual for a graphical application builder, providing mathematical complements to the material of chapter 32. In addition, the CD-ROM includes a time-limited version of an advanced object-oriented development environment for Windows 95 or Windows NT, as described in chapter 36, providing an excellent hands-on opportunity to try out the ideas developed throughout the book. The "Readme" file directs you to the installation instructions and system requirements.