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"The National Virtual Observatory: Tools and Techniques for Astronomical Research", published as an ASP Conference Series Volume No. 382, is now available from the ASP website: http://www.astrosociety.org/CS382.html. The price is just $35 for 750 pages of VO goodness and includes a software CD.

This volume is a collection of the NVO Summer School lectures and tutorials. It includes a complete set of software libraries and worked examples to guide the astronomer/software developer through the process of developing VO-enabled programs in a variety of programming languages and scripting environments. It is an essential guide for those interested in combining data from diverse and distributed astronomical data collections, for accessing large astronomical survey databases, and for making available to the research community one's own data collections and catalogs. In addition, the introductory material describes the origin of the Virtual Observatory and its potential role in astronomical research. Several chapters that describe research results obtained by participants in the NVO Summer Schools using VO tools and technologies are also included.

This book is suitable for astronomers and students of astronomy at the undergraduate and graduate level who have an interest in using computers and the Internet to optimize and extend their research. It would also be of interest to researchers and software professions working in related fields where access to distributed data collections is becoming essential.

Full Disclosure: I am one of the editors.