Behold the power of the microcomputer before your very eyes! This book took less than a year to complete from the initial conversations between Dan Merriam and myself to final typeset copy. This would have been impossible when the first volume of this book was published. All of the papers in this volume, with one exception, arrived on floppy disk but in four different disk formats and many wordprocessing formats. These were all handled elegantly by our typesetter and converted into the appropriate Macintosh file format. Even some of the figures were placed in the book electronically. I see this as a great boon to the world of science because of the much shorter time between inception and dispersal of scientific knowledge. As a result of using microcomputers to typeset this book, the information contained in it is current and fresh. <...>

The objective of this book is to provide a synthesis of the methods used in microfacies studies of carbonate rocks and to show how the application of microfacies studies has contributed to new developments in carbonate geology. In contrast with other textbooks on carbonate sedimentology this book focuses on those compositional and textural constituents of carbonates that reflect the depositional and diagenetic history and determine the practical usefulness of carbonate rocks.