The armoured reconnaissance units were the spearheads of Hitler's Panzer divisions, moving stealthily ahead of the tanks to locate the enemy. Otto Henning's armoured car unit of the elite Panzer-Lehr-Division fought throughout the campaigns in the West in 1944 and 1945, arriving in Normandy a few weeks before D-Day and finally surrendering in the Ruhr pocket in mid-April 1945. Henning describes the difficulties that reconnaissance forces such as his faced in the close terrain of the Normandy bocage and the threat posed by the Allies complete control of the air. He experienced first-hand the devastation wrought by the Panzer Ace Michael Wittmann's lone Tiger tank against the British 7th Armoured Division at Villers Bocage, as well as ensured the chaos and demoralisation of the Germans retreat across France. After the Battle of the Bulge and the final fighting in western Germany, Henning surrendered and endured terrible conditions in a prisoner-of-war camp until he escaped in 1947. This is a fascinating and often harrowing account of the final campaigns in Western Europe.

These proceedings contain most of the papers that werepresented at the Second International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications (LATA 2008), held in Tarragona, Spain, during March 13-19, 2008. The scope of LATA is rather broad, including: words, languages and - tomata; grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, multidimensional, uni?- tion, categorial, etc. );grammarsandautomataarchitectures;extendedautomata; combinatorics on words; language varieties and semigroups; algebraic language theory; computability; computational, descriptional, and parameterized c- plexity;decidability questions onwordsandlanguages;patterns andcodes;s- bolic dynamics; regulated rewriting; trees, tree languages and tree machines; term rewriting; graphs and graph transformation; power series; fuzzy and rough languages; cellular automata; DNA and other models of bio-inspired comp- ing; quantum, chemical and optical computing; biomolecular nanotechnology; automata and logic; algorithms on automata and words; automata for s- tem analysis and program veri?cation; automata, concurrency and Petri nets; parsing; weighted machines; transducers; foundations of ?nite state technology; grammatical inference and algorithmic learning; text retrieval, pattern mat- ing and pattern recognition; text algorithms; string and combinatorial issues in computationalbiologyandbioinformatics;mathematicalevolutionarygenomics; language-based cryptography; data and image compression; circuits and n- works; language-theoretic foundations of arti?cial intelligence and arti?cial life; digital libraries; and document engineering. LATA 2008 received 134 submissions. Each of them was reviewed by at least three Program Committee members plus, in most cases, by additional external referees. After a thorough and vivid evaluation phase the committee decided to accept 40 papers (which means an acceptance rate of 29. 85%

Bei der Herstellung und Verarbeitung von Baustoffen laufen chemische Prozesse ab. Bauingenieure und Architekten mussen diese Vorgange zumindest ansatzweise kennen. "Baustoffchemie" vermittelt grundlegende Kenntnisse zur Beurteilung der Einsatzmoglichkeiten von Baustoffen, ihres Verhaltens gegenuber Umwelteinflussen, der Vertraglichkeit verschiedener Baustoffe untereinander und zur Diagnose und Behandlung von Bauschaden.