This book presents a guide to the extensive literature on the topic of semirings and includes a complete bibliography. It serves as a complement to the existing monographs and a point of reference to researchers and students on this topic. The literature on semirings has evolved over many years, in a variety of languages, by authors representing different schools of mathematics and working in various related fields. Recently, semiring theory has experienced rapid development, although publications are widely scattered. This survey also covers those newly emerged areas of semiring applications that have not received sufficient treatment in widely accessible monographs, as well as many lesser-known or forgotten' works.

The author has been collecting the bibliographic data for this book since 1985. Over the years, it has proved very useful for specialists. For example, J.S. Golan wrote he owed ... a special debt to Kazimierz Glazek, whose bibliography proved to be an invaluable guide to the bewildering maze of literature on semirings'. U. Hebisch and H.J. Weinert also mentioned his collection of literature had been of great assistance to them. Now updated to include publications up to the beginning of 2002, this work is available to a wide readership.

Audience: This volume is the first single reference that can guide the interested scholar or student to the relevant publications in semirings, semifields, algebraic theory of languages and automata, positive matrices and other generalisations, and ordered semigroups and groups.

This volume presents a short guide to the extensive literature concerning semir ings along with a complete bibliography. The literature has been created over many years, in variety of languages, by authors representing different schools of mathematics and working in various related fields. In many instances the terminology used is not universal, which further compounds the difficulty of locating pertinent sources even in this age of the Internet and electronic dis semination of research results. So far there has been no single reference that could guide the interested scholar or student to the relevant publications. This book is an attempt to fill this gap. My interest in the theory of semirings began in the early sixties, when to gether with Bogdan W glorz I tried to investigate some algebraic aspects of compactifications of topological spaces, semirings of semicontinuous functions, and the general ideal theory for special semirings. (Unfortunately, local alge braists in Poland told me at that time that there was nothing interesting in investigating semiring theory because ring theory was still being developed). However, some time later we became aware of some similar investigations hav ing already been done. The theory of semirings has remained "my first love" ever since, and I have been interested in the results in this field that have been appearing in literature (even though I have not been active in this area myself)."