This second edition of Basic Data if Plasma Physics is, in essence, a new book, for several reasons. First, so voluminous have been the research results in this area since the first edition of 1959 that the basic data themselves are greatly changed and enlarged. Second, whereas the earlier edition presented much of the material in verbal form, this one displays almost all of it in a consistent set of graphic figures. And, finally, this new edition is one of the first implementations of computer-based information transfer, in which the basic data were searched out by means of a remote console tied into a central disk library containing an extensive collection of bibliographic information on physics literature.
This last matter deserves further amplification, since the new techniques employed here are likely to be used more and more often in the future – because of the ever more rapidly expanding volume of research results just mentioned.