From the Preface: There has been a great upsurge in interest in light microscopy in recent years due to the advent of a number of significant advances in microscopy, one of the most important of which is confocal microscopy. Confocal microscopy has now become an important research tool, with a large number of new fluorescent dyes becoming available in the past few years for probing your pet structure or molecule within fixed or living cell or tissue samples. Many of the people interested in using confocal microscopy to further their research do not have a microscopy or even a cell biology background, and so not only do they find considerable difficulty in obtaining satisfactory results with a confocal, but they may be mislead by how data is being presented. This manual is intended to teach [its readers] the basic concepts of microscopy, fluorescence, digital imaging, and the principles of confocal microscopy so that [they] may take full advantage of the excellent confocal microscopes now available. This manual is an excellent reference source for information related to confocal microscopy for both beginners and more advanced users. The main emphasis in this manual in on the laser scanning confocal microscopes used in biology. However, a variety of related imaging technologies are briefly introduced as a comparison.