Whilst there is much useful information within the 13 chapters of this book, it does not read as a cohesive whole and I found it hard to identify its most suitable market. For those interested in specific crops, there are many more detailed crop-specific titles available whilst there is, perhaps, too much detail for plant breeding students. This is a shame as many of the individual chapters are sound and thorough pieces of work. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on maize breeding, as it is a good review of its development in North America. The first four chapters provide a reasonable overview of the techniques and issues in contemporary plant breeding, although I found the chapter on bioinformatics rather constrained. Key resources are described but, given the authors' definition of ‘Applied Bioinformatics’, I was hoping to see some ideas on the integration of genomic data with the phenotypic information that abounds in some plant breeding programmes and thereby improve breeding efficiency. As much of the debate on issues such as the use of transgenes has been covered in the opening chapters, the frequent addition of sections on transgenes in the individual crop chapters was tedious and served no useful purpose for those crops where transgenes had not been deployed in cultivars. The book really needed a concluding chapter that compared and contrasted the issues raised in the preceding nine chapters on individual crops. In conclusion, I found much of interest in this book but felt that better editing could have led to a radical improvement.