Combinatorial chemistry and molecular diversity approaches to scientific and novel product R & D have exploded in the 1990s. For example, in the preparation of drug candidates, the automated, permutational, and combinatorial use of chemical building blocks now allows the generation and screening of unprecedented numbers of compounds. Drug discovery - better, faster, cheaper? Indeed more compounds have been made and screened in the 1990s than in the last hundred years of pharmaceutical research. The second volume in this series includes contributions on methods, solid phases, purification, analysis, carbohydrates, patent strategies and tactics, diversity profiling and combinatorial series design, and finishes with a survey of chemical libraries yielding biologically active agents and a compendium of solid phase chemistry publications. Each contribution is prepared by a recognized expert resulting in a high quality account of the recent advances in the field.