The groundbreaking results of the near past - Donaldson's result on Lef schetz pencils on symplectic manifolds and Giroux's correspondence be tween contact structures and open book decompositions - brought a top ological flavor to global symplectic and contact geometry. This topological aspect is strengthened by the existing results of Weinstein and Eliashberg (and Gompf in dimension 4) on handle attachment in the symplectic and Stein category, and by Giroux's theory of convex surfaces, enabling us to perform surgeries on contact 3-manifolds. The main objective of these notes is to provide a...