ch. 1. The light microscope -- ch. 2. Optical contrasting techniques -- ch. 3. Fluorescence and fluorescence microscopy -- ch. 4. Image capture -- ch. 5. The confocal microscope -- ch. 6. The digital image -- ch. 7. Aberrations and their consequences -- ch. 8. Nonlinear microscopy -- ch. 9. High-speed confocal microscopy -- ch. 10. Deconvolution and image processing -- ch. 11. Three-dimensional imaging : stereoscopy and reconstruction -- ch. 12. Green fluorescent protein -- ch. 13. Fluorescent staining -- ch. 14. Quantitative fluorescence -- ch. 15. Advanced fluorescence techniques : FLIM, FRET, and FCS -- ch. 16. Evanescent wave microscopy -- ch. 17. Beyond the diffraction limit.