Book excerpt: This invaluable book has been designed to be useful to most practising scientists and engineers, whatever their field and however rusty their mathematics and programming might be. The approach taken is largely practical, with algorithms being presented in full and working code (in BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL AND C) included on a floppy disk to help the reader get up and running as quickly as possible. The text could also be used as part of an undergraduate course on search and optimisation. Student exercises are included at the end of several of the chapters, many of which are computer-based and designed to encourage exploration of the method.