Stanley Humphries:  This book evolved from the first term of a two-term course on the physics of charged particle acceleration that I taught at the University of New Mexico and at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The first term covered conventional accelerators in the single particle limit. The second term covered collective effects in charged particle beams, including high current transport and instabilities. The material was selected to make the course accessible to graduate students in physics and electrical engineering with no previous background in accelerator theory. Nonetheless, I sought to make the course relevant to accelerator researchers by including complete derivations and essential formulas. The organization of the book reflects my outlook as an experimentalist. I followed a building block approach, starting with basic material and adding new techniques and insights in a programmed sequence. I included extensive review material in areas that would not be familiar to the average student and in areas where my own understanding needed reinforcement. I tried to make the derivations as simple as possible by making physical approximations at the beginning of the derivation rather than at the end. Because the text was intended as an introduction to the field of accelerators, I felt that it was important to preserve a close connection with the physical basis of the derivations; therefore, I avoided treatments that required advanced methods of mathematical analysis. Most of the illustrations in the book were generated numerically from a library of demonstration microcomputer programs that I developed for the courses. Accelerator specialists will no doubt find many important areas that are not covered. I apologize in advance for the inevitable consequence of writing a book of finite length.