Book excerpt: An elective course in the final-year BEng progamme in electronic engin eering in the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong was generated in response to the growing need of local industry for graduate engineers capable of designing circuits and performing measurements at high frequencies up to a few gigahertz. This book has grown out from the lecture and tutorial materials written specifically for this course. This course should, in the opinion of the author, best be conducted if students can take a final-year design project in the same area. Examples of projects in areas related to the subject matter of this book which have been completed successfully in the last two years that the course has been run include: low-noise amplifiers, dielectric resonator-loaded oscillators and down converters in the 12 GHz as well as the 1 GHz bands; mixers; varactor-tuned and non-varactor-tuned VCOs; low-noise and power amplifiers; and filters and duplexers in the 1 GHz, 800 MHz and 500 MHz bands. The book is intended for use in a course of forty lecture hours plus twenty tutorial hours and the prerequisite expected of the readers is a general knowledge of analogue electronic circuits and basic field theory. Readers with no prior knowledge in high-frequency circuits are recom mended to read the book in the order that it is arranged. ~ ______ In_t_ro_d_u_c_tl_·o_n ______ ~1 ~ 1.