The first volume of their work is about laparoscopic hernia repair. Each inguinal hernia is so different, our teachers used to say, if one could do a hernia operation confidently, he could do any operation safely. Though open surgery for inguinal hernia is relatively simple, laparoscopic surgery requires lot of experience and reorientation of inguinal anatomy from inside, much more so for recurrent or complicated ones. During the long learning curve, mistakes can occur from the hands of beginners and those working in low volume centres, this book explains those in clear detail, with adequate illustrations, with a primary aim of preventing surgical errors. It is also very important to assimilate the technological advances in laparoscopic instruments, energy sources, meshes and suture material, so that they could find application in appropriate places and situations, for optimal outcome.

It is always difficult to decide how much to say in a situation, while writing a foreword, but with the vast experience of the authors as surgeons and teachers, I am impressed that they could filter the actual required information just appropriate for a junior surgeon. I congratulate the authors for the effort they put in to make this a practical reference book in various common as well as advanced laparoscopic procedures in surgical practice.

Toward this end we felt that a book containing line diagrams and detailing the minutiae of the surgical procedures would help the novice laparoscopist choose his surgical steps with studied confidence. This series is essentially one that provides the complete bandwidth of procedures, starting from diagnostic laparoscopy and going all the way to laparoscopic oncology and bariatric surgery.

We have divided the subject matter into 14 volumes, that will hopefully cover almost all the available operative surgery spectrum of laparoscopy. You are holding one such volume in your hand.

A final word of advice to our dear readers, you need not buy all the volumes at one go. We would like you to progress in 2 or 3 areas at one time depending on your chosen field of advancement. If you are doing gallbladders already, perhaps you could advance to antireflux surgery or hernioplasty, rather than a single incision colectomy! As you gain experience and exposure you can purchase the next few volumes.

We wish you all the enjoyment and excitement that we have experienced in our learning curves and we hope your curve is much shorter than ours!!!

Dr Chitrakala Rajkumar, Dr Dilip Chandar, Dr Poornima, Dr Nataraja Sethupathy, Dr Anirudh Rajkumar, Sarvanan, Menaka, Shalini, Meena Kesan, and Akila for helping with the typing of the manuscript.

We thank every single patient who enriched our surgical experience and made us what we are today. And last but not least, we pay our humble respects to the doyens of surgery—the giants upon whose shoulders we dwarves stood and looked at the world. Prof S Vittal, Prof CMK Reddy, and Prof MG Muthukumaraswamy, to mention a few in a golden list.

We would also like to thank Mr Jitendar P Vij (Group Chairman), Mr Ankit Vij (Group President), Ms Chetna Malhotra Vohra (Associate Director), Mr Umar Rashid (Development Editor) and Production team of Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers (P) Ltd., New Delhi, India.