This text is intended to be a populist book.With so many complex equation–filled engineering books lining theshelves of our bookstores, perhaps you are wondering whether the scienceof microwaves and RF is ready for a text that can be understood by thosewho do not speak Latin or wear black robes. We believe so. The goal of apopulist book is to appeal as much to the academic at a highbrow universityas to the practitioner working in today’s frantic production environment.We hope you will find this text as relevant to your work of teaching othersas to improving your own skills.This book is written for practicing engineers and for those who wouldlike to become one. And these days, who can afford not to keep learning?Whether you are a student at your final year of college, an engineer inindustry who has just been assigned your first RF design project, or a seasonedveteran of the magic of microwave design, we hope that you will allfind something useful in these pages. Even if you are a microwave or RFindustry guru with most of the answers already, our experience in writingthis has been that there is still a thing or two out there that needs explaining.If you cannot find anything that seems inexplicable, then at least youwill have the satisfaction of reassuring yourself that you have indeed beenright all these (long!) years.We do not suggest you throw away your other excellent text booksthat explain semiconductor transport equations, Green’s functions, or thecomplex mathematics of filter design; just that this effort might make thosepaperweights all the more relevant. Do not misunderstand us—we do notimply that anyone can become a high-grade RF circuit and systemdesigner without using any complex algebra. We feel strongly, however,that you do not need as much of it as some of the courses you have takenbefore may have included.This book and Volume I are the culmination of more than 40 jointyears of teaching these topics to thousands of practicing electrical engineers fromaround the world. Little by little, we have extended the scope of ourcourses and learned the simplest ways to convey basic ideas to our audience.We have often been surprised and have found for the most part thatour audience is generally not interested in obtaining guru status or academicknowledge, but interested rather in gaining an understanding of microwave and RF circuits, in gaining intuitive insight, and in applyingthat to their work. We hope we have captured that spirit herein.This book is not written for the expert. If anything, we have omittedspecialist material (it is long enough as it is!). We often begin our courses bytelling our students that if they have spent the past year characterizing theintermodulation properties of a device to design a predistorter circuit, theyare probably already one of just a handful of experts in the world in thatarea—and they can probably teach us something. Although we hope thisbook will convey the background and insight to set you on the road tobecoming an expert, it will not take you down the narrow and windinglanes that make you one. We have focused on discrete circuits and discretecircuit design rather than IC design, believing that only when discretedesign is mastered can those techniques be applied to integrated circuits. Inconsciously stopping short of IC design, we have not considered manyworthy topics, such as RC or AGC oscillators or complex biasing techniques.Nor have we considered integrated systems such as phase-lockedloops. All these topics are worthily covered elsewhere in expert texts oftheir own, and rightly so. Perhaps a third volume of this series will one dayattempt to simplify those topics as well, should our wives ever let us backnear our computers again!