There has been a small revolution in data acquisition systems for scientific use in recent years. It was not so long ago that hardware and processing power were expensive and software nonexistent. Every program had to be written from scratch in a low-level language and, if you did not want your program to take all night to run, it usually included large chunks of assembler code as well. Nowadays there are many data acquisition systems to choose from, with good hardware and vastly improved software running on fast personal computers. Many such systems are purchased with the aim of using them as the primary method of recording experimental data in the laboratory. Unfortunately, it is not always as easy to set up the system as the manufacturers would have us believe and getting the machine to do what you want it to do with your apparatus can be a daunting and frustrating task. This book was written to help people collect and analyse experimental data using digital data acquisition systems and is particularly for those whose field of expertise is not engineering or computing. The book explains how data acquisition systems work, how to set them up to obtain the best performance and how to process the data. Terms which may be unfamiliar are explained so that manufacturer's specifications and literature become clearer and the differences between systems can be appreciated. The topics covered in the book are general but the examples are slanted towards the life sciences because this is often the discipline in which people have the greatest trouble setting up data acquisition systems.