Book excerpt: The second edition of Fundamentals of Preparative and Nonlinear Chromatography is devoted to the fundamentals of a new process of purification or extraction of chemicals or proteins widely used in the pharmaceutical industry and in preparative chromatography. This process permits the preparation of extremely pure compounds satisfying the requests of the US Food and Drug Administration. The book describes the fundamentals of thermodynamics, mass transfer kinetics, and flow through porous media that are relevant to chromatography. It presents the models used in chromatography and their solutions, discusses the applications made, describes the different processes used, their numerous applications, and the methods of optimization of the experimental conditions of this process.