Book excerpt: "Advanced Sliding Mode Control for Mechanical Systems: Design, Analysis and MATLAB Simulation" takes readers through the basic concepts, covering the most recent research in sliding mode control. The book is written from the perspective of practical engineering and examines numerous classical sliding mode controllers, including continuous time sliding mode control, discrete time sliding mode control, fuzzy sliding mode control, neural sliding mode control, backstepping sliding mode control, dynamic sliding mode control, sliding mode control based on observer, terminal sliding mode control, sliding mode control for robot manipulators, and sliding mode control for aircraft. This book is intended for engineers and researchers working in the field of control. Dr. Jinkun Liu works at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Dr. Xinhua Wang works at the National University of Singapore.