This spectacularly illustrated book celebrates the structural beauty of everyday materials and the space-age technologies used to probe their appearance. It introduces the reader to the various instruments and their uses: scanning electron, ion, and tunnelling microscopes, acoustic microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. The book describes how images are processed and analysed, and how modern materials science is based on these techniques and their ability to "see" materials at the atomic level. The book includes hundreds of illustrations and colour plates, making it a pleasure to the eye. `Overall this is the most comprehensive introduction to modern microscopy currently available, but it is more than just a dry academic text. The beauty of many of the micrographs reproduced here demonstrates the aesthetic as well as the scientific rewards which can be gained by looking ever more closely at the materials which surround us. Metals and Materials