Just over twenty years ago I began writing a book, the
forerunner to this present volume for Springer Verlag,
entitled: Advanced Machining – The Handbook of Cutting
Technology. This original book covered many of
the topics discussed here, but in a more general and
less informative manner. Since this previous volume
was published, many of the tooling-related topics are
now more popular, or have recently been developed.
Typical of these latter topics, are both High-speed
and Hard-part machining that have now come to the
fore. While Micro-machining and Artificial Intelligence
(AI) coupled to neural network tool condition
monitoring have become important, the latter from
a research perspective. These machining and tooling
topics, plus many others have been included herein,
but only in a relatively concise manner. It would have
been quite possible to write a book of this length just
concerned with say, drilling techniques and associated
tooling technologies alone.