One of the key concerns in modern control theory is the design of steering strategies. The implementation of such strategies is done by a regulator. Presented here is a self-contained introduction to the mathematical background of this type of regulator design. The topics selected address the matter of greatest interest to the control community, at present, namely, when the design objective is the reduction of the influence of exogeneous disturbances upon the output of the system. In a first scenario the disturbance signal is regarded as a deterministic time series with known dynamics but...