Writing the manual was like working on a four-hundred piece jigsaw puzzle, except that instead of houses and trees, the pieces contained theorems and equations, sometimes in different languages and very different notation, not to mention that they were (literally) scattered around the globe. For helping me to gather some of the pieces, I must thank all those who generously sent reprints of their papers (and sometimes even other people's papers) :

• Michael Albertson, Giorgio Balconi, Lowell Beineke, Paul Camion, Gary Chartrand, Charles Colbourn, Tamonas Gangopadhyay, Frédéric Havet, A.J.W. Hilton, Bill Kocay, Jan Kratochvíl, Terry McKee, Ronald  Read, Chris Rodger, Alexander Rosa, Ivo Rosenberg, Norma Salvi-Zagaglia, Allen Schwenk, A. Vijayakumar, Earl Glen Whitehead, Jr. and A. Pawel Wojda;
• my advisor, Stanley Fiorini who obtained other papers, and lent me the invaluable four-volume Graph Theory Reviews and other books; Irene Sciriha, who brought to my attention Stockmeyer's papers on the reconstruction conjecture and lent me various books; and Josef Lauri who gave me photocopies of other papers
• Gino Favero who sent me photocopies of over 50 papers which were not available in Malta; and Susan Raimondo and Daniele Varacca, who sent other photocopies;
• the journals section of the University of Malta Library, whose value is sometimes questioned by people who have never done any research.

• my previous employers, Magus International, and especially Jackie Chetcuti, Mario Borg and Arnold Stellini, for granting and then extending a week's leave at point blank notice so that I could finish my thesis;
• Peter Wiosna, who translated parts of H. Sachs' Über selbstkomplementäre graphen,  the first paper on self-complementary graphs;
• those who provided information: Edward Bender, Luigi Borzacchini, Gary Chartrand, Christopher Clapham, Gouli Ding, Luis Goddyn, Bill Kocay, Brendan McKay, Erich Prisner, Mukesh Punhani, Ivo Rosenberg, Allen Schwenk, Jozef Sirán and Detlef Wille;
• those who helped me get in touch with other people: Anne Bres (secretary at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique), Dimitri Chernyak, Vladimir Chernyak, Mike J. Grannell, Terry Griggs, Fausta Guzzoni (secretary at the University of Parma), Jo Ann McFarland (secretary at the University of California), Steve Quinn, Catherine P. Vistro-Yu, C.R. Rao, John Sheehan and Robin J. Wilson;
• and staff at the Department of Maths for helping in various ways - James L. Borg, who provided lots of technical assistance; Joseph Muscat and the secretary, Annabel Attard.

    I thank Prof. Fiorini for his patience and help; and my parents for their support. Last, but definitely not least, I would like to thank my sister Nadine who drew and re-drew (and re-drew) the diagrams; unfortunately I had to convert them to bitmap format, with a consequent loss in quality. On future versions of the manual I hope to use xfig or some similar package that can save diagrams in Postscript or LaTeX format.