This is an effectively instructive programmed text that in a well-organized fashion, at the introductory level, will enlighten the highly self-disciplined, developing medical professional, student, clinician, teacher, and/or researcher in the ways of rigorous application of the scientific method for studying the occurrence, distribution, and determinants of disease in populations, ie, epidemiology. The author potentially reaches well beyond his stated target of facilitating an understanding of basic descriptive, analytical, and clinical epidemiology for the motivated undergraduate medical or health sciences student. Indeed, this work should have appeal, at least on a short refresher course basis, for the clinician-internist-researcher who has active or imminent research interests and activities beyond consideration of individual patient diagnostics and in areas involving clinical analytical epidemiology and/or public health and preventive medicine considerations. A significant part of its appeal to the internist should be directly attributable to the almost exclusively clinically medically oriented, realistic example data,