Dr W-N Venables is a senior Statistician with the " CSIRO/CMIS Environmetrics Project " in Australia, having been at the Department of Statistics, University of Adelaide, for many years previously. Professor B-D Ripley holds the Chair of Applied Statistics at the University of Oxford, and is the author of four other books on spatial statistics, simulation, pattern recognition, and neural networks. Both authors are known and respected throughout the international S and R communities, for their books, workshops, short courses, and freely available software, and through their extensive contributions to the S-news and R mailing lists.