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Foreword to the Second EditionWe were very happy to learn that the first edition of our book has received kind acceptance of a wide readership. Answering to this reaction and to the suggestion of the editors, we decided to prepare the second edition. In this edition we have tried to correct all the errors and to implement the improvements suggested by the readers. We are very grateful to all who have transferred their remarks to us. In particular, we have significantly re-elaborated Chapter 9, making it closer to practitioners.
Foreword to the First EditionThis book is the result of a collaborative Polish-German project which has been partially supported by the Committee for Scientific Research 1 and the Deutsche For-schungsgemeinschaft2. We appreciate the help of both institutions.The planning and preparation of the manuscript was an iterative and rather lengthy process which we had to stop at a certain stage, but this does not mean that we were fully satisfied with the output. Thus, comments and improvements will be appreciated.In the meantime we would like to thank many colleagues who already discussed with us different topics presented in the book. We are not able to list all of them but we would like to express our special gratitude toward
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