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Concerning the Szlenk index

We discuss pruning and coloring lemmas on regular families. We discuss several applications of these lemmas to computing the Szlenk index of certain $w^*$ compact subsets of the dual of a separable Banach space. Applications include estimates of the Szlenk index of Minkowski sums, infinite direct sums of separable Banach spaces, constant reduction, and three space properties. We also consider using regular families to construct Banach spaces with prescribed Szlenk index. As a consequence, we give a characterization of which countable ordinals occur as the Szlenk index of a Banach space, prove the optimality of a previous universality result, and compute the Szlenk index of the injective tensor product of separable Banach spaces.