The book heavily relies on illustrations, tables and concise printed algorithms to convey key information: all the material remains easily accessible. The book is fully self-contained: graphs and tables can be readily reproduced by programming at most a few dozen lines of computer code. Most sections lead from an elementary discussion to the rich and difficult problems of contemporary computational and statistical physics, and will be of interest to a wide range of students, teachers and researchers in physics and the neighboring sciences. An accompanying companion website www.oup.co.uk/companion/krauth allows to incorporate the layout material (illustrations, tables, schematic programs) into the reader’s own presentations.