If you have a good statistical background, this book should be relatively easy to read and could be recommended as an introduction to simulation. It should be supplemented by a book that discusses the development of simulations more realistically and more deeply, however. Also, it is practical only insofar as it is easy to read. The book is impractical, because the examples it uses are simple and do not appear to arise from the development of realistic simulations.

The book is easy to read because it is short and well illustrated. It uses graphs, charts, and tables effectively and contains useful chapter summaries. Although the book contains 372 pages plus appendices, it is really very short. Lines are widely spaced, extra spacing is used between sections, and the margins are wide. This wide spacing appears to have at least doubled the number of pages.

I will illustrate the way the book is impractical and uses inadequate examples by describing two chapters--the first and eighth--in greater detail. In their preface, the authors state that they have “delineated the simulation process in very great detail” in the first chapter. Unfortunately, the chapter contains almost no examples of any kind and does not adequately focus on the way the applications to be made of the simulation should be used to drive and control the development of the simulation. Readers who have not developed simulations themselves would be hard pressed to figure out how to develop them from the description given in this chapter. The discussion of validity in chapter 8 contains no examples. They are needed if the reader is to apply the general and abstract principles that are discussed to a real problem.

Another consideration in deciding whether you might be interested in this book is that mathematical notation is used extensively throughout. This is especially true of chapters 2 through 6, in which it may be somewhat appropriate because statistical methodology is discussed, but such notation appears frequently in other chapters, such as chapter 8, in which it is less appropriate and even somewhat annoying.