In the ten years since the first edition of this book went to press, the field of statistical computing has exploded with innovations in many directions. At one time my goal was to write a comprehensive book on the subject. At this moment, however, my goals for a second edition must be more modest. Because the field has grown so much, the scope of this book has now become the core for a subset of this field. To fill in some gaps in this new core, a few sections have been added (e.g., linear programming) and others have been expanded. Many corrections have been made; I can only hope that just a few errors remain.

A second change in this timespan is the rapid widespread adoption of R in the field of statistics. As language and culture shape each other, my own views on computing have changed from teaching this material using R. Small changes scattered throughout reflect this change in viewpoint. Additionally, most of the demonstrations and examples – all that seemed appropriate – have been translated to R and are available on my Web site for this book (http://www4.stat.ncsu.edu/~monahan/nmos2/toc.html).

Thanks are due to Lauren Cowles of Cambridge University Press for encouraging this second edition. Karen Chiswell deserves recognition for finding numerous typos and providing other corrections. I would like to also thank Jerry Davis and Wendy Meiring for pointing out others. Bruce McCullough provided invaluable feed back, comments, questions, and suggestions.