Partington has produced an attractive and useful introduction to the field of applied corpus linguistics, a field that has been around for 40 years (since the Brown corpus) but is only now coming into its own in the United States. The volume is attractive for three main reasons: it is clearly and pleasantly written, it quotes extensively and appropriately from the earlier general and applied linguistics literature, and it contains an impressive range of examples consisting of concordance lines followed by commentary and analysis.