Following the first two volumes "Dendrimers" (TCC vol. 197) and "Dendrimers II" (TCC vol. 210), the third volume dealing with this topic is now appearing in print (the "tetralogy" on dendrimers will soon be completed with the fourth volume). The present volume comprises a collection of up-to-date reviews written by renowned pioneers of research in the dendrimer field, three of whom lectured at the 1. International Dendrimer Symposium (IDS-1 1999) in Frankfurt. A focus of this volume is the variety of material properties of soft and shape-persistent dendrimers. As its predecessors did, this volume breaks through the frontiers to neighboring disciplines and, in an interdisciplinary approach, addresses topics such as polydisperse, hyperbranched macromolecules (dendritic polymers), the analysis of shape and density by small-angle scattering techniques, finely dispersed metals (dendrimers as catalysts), and nanotechnology close to potential applications.