This book is intended as a textbook and reference for courses in fisheries stock assessment and management. It is aimed at advanced undergraduates or professionals but does not, the authors claim, require advanced calculus or linear algebra. Such claims are common for many textbooks -this is one occasion where I can agree. The contents are divided into four sections: (I) Introduction (i.e. the need for analysis); (II) Behaviour of Fisheries; (III) Estimation of Parameters and (IV) Managing Fisheries. The authors state at the outset that they regard Sections II and IV as the most important and that Section III covers material that is often covered elsewhere. Nevertheless, Section III is by far the largest portion of the book and gives a complete flavour that makes the whole very appealing. What many readers will find poorly represented (as the authors acknowledge) are tropical stock assessment and the analysis of length data.
There is an accompanying IBM 5 t/4-inch floppy disc containing 199 files organized on a one-subdirectory-per-chapter basis. All the programs are written to run either with QuickBasic (available with MS DOS 5) or with GWBASIC/BASICA (available with MS DOS 4). The vast majority of the files run with QuickBasic; at the time of writing the review I do not have a copy of that program and so cannot comment on the programs on the disc. All the programs, however, are collected by the authors from their own teaching material and should be well tried and tested. The intention has been to provide straightforward programs that work and that can be built upon, rather than highly userfriendly products. The files on the disc may be freely distributed and should provide excellent material for teaching purposes. The documentation on file is succinct and easy to follow. It has been distributed both as Microsoft Word (for DOS) and plain ASCII files.
The main criteria that most readers will use to judge this book are its breadth of coverage of the field and its amenability to the intended audience. Taking the second criterion first, the authors have, in my opinion, produced a very readable book that is clearly laid out and is actually quite enjoyable! The style of writing is not at all formal and there is no belabouring of points or recourse to jargon. There are sufficient tables and figures to be useful, but not an overcluttering. Nor are there the numerous, distracting boxes and asides that seem to bedevil so many modern textbooks. My only quibble, and it is one of taste, is that there are, perhaps, just a few too many rhetorical questions. Are they really necessary? Overall, I think that the book will prove easy to pick up both as a source of ideas and as a manual. The style is accessible to students and professionals alike and also to non-native English speakers.
The material covered is not exhaustive, nor is it very detailed in any one area. The point of the book, though, is not to provide a manual of state-of-the-art assessment methodology. What is provided is a collection of material that clearly distinguishes