Book excerpt: This book contains the papers that were accepted for presentation at the 1988 NATO Advanced Study Institute on Underwater Acoustic Data Processing, held at the Royal Military College of Canada from 18 to 29 July, 1988. Approximately 110 participants from various NATO countries were in attendance during this two week period. Their research interests range from underwater acoustics to signal processing and computer science; some are renowned scientists and some are recent Ph.D. graduates. The purpose of the ASI was to provide an authoritative summing up of the various research activities related to sonar technology. The exposition on each subject began with one or two tutorials prepared by invited lecturers, followed by research papers which provided indications of the state of development in that specific area. I have broadly classified the papers into three sections under the titles of I. Propagation and Noise, II. Signal Processing and III. Post Processing. The reader will find in Section I papers on low frequency acoustic sources and effects of the medium on underwater acoustic propagation. Problems such as coherence loss due to boundary interaction, wavefront distortion and multipath transmission were addressed. Besides the medium, corrupting noise sources also have a strong influence on the performance of a sonar system and several researchers described methods of modeling these sources.