This is the long anticipated second edition of the highly successful 1984 textbook on quantitative approaches to understanding and prediction in agriculture. The book remains targeted at the advanced student level and contains an astonishing breadth of material. It is divided into three main sections covering general techniques in the first section, and their application to crops and animals in the following two. Most of the important topics are touched on, giving the student an opportunity to explore many of the key areas where modelling approaches have been used. The comprehensive nature of the coverage also makes it easy to see the connections between different areas, and the extent to which concepts can be applied in many different contexts. The authors admit in the preface that the topics covered are strongly flavoured by their own experiences and backgrounds and some areas have inevitably received more attention than others. For example, whilst there is material on metabolism and an introduction to modelling biochemical reactions, I could find no mention of control theoretical approaches, or perhaps more worryingly, almost nothing to be said of more recent systems approaches. Naturally, for a book of this breadth there has been some compromise on depth. To help with this, there is an extensive bibliography at the end of this book, although with very few citations less than five years old, one may need to search for the latest information elsewhere. Nevertheless, for anyone starting out in agricultural science and seeking an overview of mainstream modelling approaches, there are few better places to start.