Book excerpt: This book is the first comprehensive introduction to the theory of equatorially-confined waves and currents in the ocean. Among the topics treated are inertial and shear instabilities, wave generation by coastal reflection, semiannual and annual cycles in the tropic sea, transient equatorial waves, vertically-propagating beams, equatorial Ekman layers, the Yoshida jet model, generation of coastal Kelvin waves from equatorial waves by reflection, Rossby solitary waves, and Kelvin frontogenesis. A series of appendices on midlatitude theories for waves, jets and wave reflections add further material to assist the reader in understanding the differences between the same phenomenon in the equatorial zone versus higher latitudes.