Some notes on the book contents

The primary aim of this book is to provide readers interested in solid sample pretreatment with an overview of available techniques for development of this step of the analytical process. The title of the book is intended to reflect that it is mainly concerned with the dissolution or removal of target analytes from solid samples. Once they have selected the technique most closely fitting their intended purpose, readers can obtain a deeper knowledge about the technique of choice in the specialized literature — in fact, providing a thorough description of each of the wide variety of sample pretreatment techniques available at present was obviously outside the scope of a book like this. In fact, only those aspects that can be illustrated with reasonable concision are dealt with specifically in it. For identical reasons, the book does not touch on the subsequent steps of the analytical process. The authors therefore assume that the reader will be acquainted with the general principles of chromatography in its different variants, as well as with those of commonplace molecular optical and electroanalytical techniques, and atomic and mass spectrometries. 

Although no explicit separation has been made, the devices and techniques dealt with in this book have been grouped in two different, broad categories, namely  

Because of their special features, workstations and robotic stations are dealt with separately (in Chapter 10) from the techniques in the previous two groups. 

The authors have avoided the inclusion of exhaustive application tables, which would have unduly lengthened the book. Rather, only those references considered to be essential to illustrate some theoretical or practical aspect of the different techniques, and others representative of the state of the art in each, have been included. For comprehensive tables compiling applications or some other aspect, interested readers are referred to the reviews periodically published in specialist journals. 

Although sample preparation may sound archaic and alchemy-related in a time where the buzzwords are terms such as genomic or proteomics, both updated and emergent sciences and technologies continue to rely on analyses and, ultimately, on sample pretreatment. 

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