Book excerpt: Holographic Interferometry provides a valuable and up-to-date source of information in the rapidly expanding field. The eight specialists` contributions cover the principles and methods currently in use. The scope of the book has been limited to the study of opaque object and ample space has been devoted to a comprehensive treatment of the phenomena of fringe formation, with a particular emphasis on the quantitative evaluation of the holographic interference fringe patterns. The emergence of computer-aided fringe analysis and phase-shifting techniques have simplified considerably the quantative real-time measurements of object shapes and deformations. The last two chapters provide a reasonably detailedoverview of full-field holographic methods for the measurement of shapes, displacements, dervatives, difference displacements and vibrations.