In early 1987 I was attempting to develop a CVD-based tungsten process for Intel. At every step ofthe development, information that we were collecting had to be analyzed in light of theories and hypotheses from books and papers in many unrelated subjects. Thesesources were so widely different that I came to realize there was no unifying treatment of CVD and its subprocesses. More interestingly, my colleagues in the industry were from many disciplines (a surface chemist, a mechanical engineer, a geologist, and an electrical engineer werein my group). To help us understand the field of CVD and its players, some of us organized the CVD user's group of Northern California in 1988. The idea for writing a book on the subject occurred to me during that time. I had already organized my thoughts for a course I taught at San Jose State University. Later Van Nostrand agreed to publish my book as a text intended for students at the senior/first year graduate level and for process engineers in the microelectronics industry, This book is not intended to be bibliographical, and it does not cover every new material being studied for chemical vapor deposition. On the other hand, it does present the principles of CVD at a fundamental level while uniting them with the needs of the microelectronics industry.