Book excerpt: A detailed exposition of the most common mathematical models in population and community ecology, covering exponential and logistic population growth, age-structured demography, metapopulation dynamics, competition, predation, and island biogeography. Intended to demystify ecological models and the math behind them by deriving the models from first principles. The primer may be used as a self-teaching tutorial, as a primary textbook, or as a supplemental text to a general ecology textbook. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR