X-shooter: What stands behind the good performance

One year of operations demonstrated the high level of scientific performance of the X-shooter spectrograph. The excellent science opened by this instrument is described in various papers within this volume. The purpose of this contribution is to briefly describe the novel technical solution adopted in the design and construction phase of X-shooter that made it a successful instrument and the aforementioned science possible (© 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)