Richard J. Adams

With over 40,000 described species, spiders have adapted to nearly every terrestrial environment across the globe. Over half of the world's spider families live within the three contiguous Pacific Coast states--not surprising considering the wide variety of habitats, from mountain meadows and desert dunes to redwood forests and massive urban centers. This beautifully illustrated, accessible guide covers all of the families and many of the genera found along the Pacific Coast, including introduced species and common garden spiders. The author provides readers with tools for identifying many of the region's spiders to family, and when possible, genus and species. He discusses taxonomy, distribution, and natural history as well as what is known of the habits of the spiders, the characters of families, and references to taxonomic revisions of the pertinent genera. Full-color plates for each family bring to life the incredible diversity of this ancient arachnid order.

Manual flight control system design for fighter aircraft is one of the most demanding problems in automatic control. Fighter aircraft dynamics generally have highly coupled uncertain and nonlinear dynamics. Multivariable control design techniques offer a solution to this problem. Robust Multivariable Flight Control provides the background, theory and examples for full envelope manual flight control system design. It gives a versatile framework for the application of advanced multivariable control theory to aircraft control problems. Two design case studies are presented for the manual flight control of lateral/directional axes of the VISTA-F-16 test vehicle and an F-18 trust vectoring system. They demonstrate the interplay between theory and the physical features of the systems.