Ebook: Mass spectrometry basics -

Boca Raton, London, New York, Washington, D.C. CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, 2003. – 474 p.
This book began as a small series of brief articles designed to assist engineers and salesmen in understanding some aspects of ion chemistry and mass spectrometry. Each article was composed of a very short summary and a longer section that described aspects of the subject matter in somewhat greater detail. To facilitate rapid reading and assimilation, extensive use was made of figures and tables, which contain additional information in their legends or footnotes.
From the outset of writing these articles, it was never intended that they should be exhaustively comprehensive, because this approach would have defeated the aims of the whole exercise, viz. , the provision of short, quick explanations of major elements of mass spectrometry and closely allied topics. The traditional, more all-embracing approach to writing about mass spectrometry was left to the many excellent authors, who have provided impressive textbooks. In contrast, the major objective of the Back-to-Basics series was the provision of quick explanations of fundamental concepts in mass spectrometry, without overelaboration. As far as possible, descriptions of processes, applications, and underlying science were made with a minimum of text backed up by easily and rapidly understood pictures. Although some major equations of relevance to mass spectrometry have been introduced, the mathematical derivations of these equations were largely omitted. This was not an attempt to dumb down an important discipline. Rather, the intent was to make some of the esoteric aspects of an important area of analysis readily comprehensible to the many people who have to deal with mass spectrometers but who have not been trained specifically in this branch of science and engineering. The series began about ten years ago and encompasses recent and past developments in mass spectrometry. However, since it is the principles of mass spectrometry that are explained and not specific instrumentation, the information content remains as relevant now as it was ten years ago.