Book excerpt: Fundamentals of Grid Generation is an outstanding text/reference designed to introduce students in applied mathematics, mechanical engineering, and aerospace engineering to structured grid generation. It provides excellent reference material for practitioners in industry, and it presents new concepts to researchers. Readers will learn what boundary-conforming grids are, how to generate them, and how to devise their own methods. The text is written in a clear, intuitive style that doesn't get bogged down in unnecessary abstractions. Topics covered include planar, surface, and 3-D grid generation; numerical techniques; solution adaptivity; the finite volume approach to discretization of hosted equations; concepts from elementary differential geometry; and the transformation of differential operators to general coordinate systems. The book also reviews the literature on algebraic, conformal, orthogonal, hyperbolic, parabolic, elliptic, biharmonic, and variational approaches to grid generation. This unique volume closes with the author's original methods of variational grid generation.