Designed as a text as well as a treatise for active mathematicians, this volume begins with an unusual notice: "The book is addressed to those who know the meaning of each word in the title." As such, it constituted the first systematic account of the theory of rings of continuous functions, and it has retained its secure position as the basic graduate-level book in this area.The authors focus on characterizing the maximal ideals and classifying their residue class fields. Problems ...