Book excerpt: Award-winning monograph of the Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Prize 1997. This book is a self-contained exposition of the spectral theory of Toeplitz operators with piecewise continuous symbols and singular integral operators with piecewise continuous coefficients. It includes an introduction to Carleson curves, Muckenhoupt weights, weighted norm inequalities, local principles, Wiener-Hopf factorization, and Banach algebras generated by idempotents. Some basic phenomena in the field and the techniques for treating them came to be understood only in recent years and are comprehensively presented here for the first time. The material has been polished in an effort to make advanced topics accessible to a broad readership. The book is addressed to a wide audience of students and mathematicians interested in real and complex analysis, functional analysis and operator theory.