Most chemists, whether they are biochemists, organic, analytical, pharmaceutical or clinical chemists and many pharmacists and biologists need to perform chemical analysis. Consequently, they are not only confronted with carrying out the actual analysis, but also with problems such as method selection, experimental design, optimization, calibration, data acquisition and handling, and statistics in order to obtain maximum relevant chemical information. In other words: they are confronted with chemometrics. This book on chemometrics, written by some of the leaders in the field, aims to provide a thorough, up-to-date introduction to this subject. The reader is given the opportunity to acquaint himself with the tools used in this discipline and the way in which they are applied. Some practical examples are given and the reader is shown how to select the appropriate tools in a given situation.

As such the book provides the means to approach and solve analytical problems strategically and systematically, without the need for the reader to become a fully-fledged chemometrician. The authors' aim was to write a tutorial book which would be useful to readers at every level in this field.

The journal Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems has a specific policy of publishing tutorial papers, (i.e. articles aiming to discuss and illustrate the application of chemometric and other techniques) solicited from leading experts in the varied disciplines relating to this subject. This book comprises reprints of tutorials from the first 5 volumes of this journal, covering the period from late 1986 to mid 1989. The authors of the papers include analytical, organic and environmental chemists, statisticians, pharmacologists, geologists, geochemists, computer scientists and biologists, which reflects the strong interdisciplinary communication. The papers have been reorganized into major themes, covering most of the main areas of chemometrics.
This book is intended both as a personal reference text and as a useful background for courses in chemometrics and laboratory computing.