The primary purpose of this book is to help youunderstand what is going on in Fourier Transform (FT) Nuclear Magnetic Resonance(NMR) spectroscopy. Modern life is now very largely life with "blackboxes" that carry warning labels: "No user-serviceable partsinside." Many find black boxes to be quite acceptable, at least aslong as they work. But how willing should we be to accept black-boxanalyses without some understanding of how those analyses were obtained? NMR spectrometers are like "black boxes" in that they offer manystandardized procedures, but it can be dangerous to the quality of your data ifyou rely slavishly on such procedures without understanding how and why theproper parameter choices are critical. The scope of this book is broad ratherthan deep with the intention of providing helpful insight. Much can beunderstood in a more qualitative way and that is the approach taken here. For those few areas where a quantitative approach is needed,simple mathematics will usually suffice.

This book has been used as a text for "Basic FT-NMR Spectroscopy" at theCalifornia Institute of Technology for the last ten years.