The field of nonlinear dynamics has grown substantially during the last decade both in the number of practitioners and in the number of results obtained. The activity has been distributed among the arenas of traditional mathematical analysis, the development of computer algorithms and new perturbation techniques, and the uncovering of applications in condensed matter physics, chemical reactions, astronomy, plasma physics, hydrodynamics, meteorology, biology, and so on. There has been concerted effort in the design of high-precision experiments to test the physical implications of many of the generic concepts and conjectures that have evolved in these various areas. Because many of the experiments have yielded positive results it has become advisable for the physics/engineering community at large to become familiar with the new techniques, if not to master them. A number of mathematical monographs on various aspects of the subject have been published fairly recently, but until the present text no authoritative work directed toward the physics/engineering community has appeared.