Hastings (Knox College, Illinois) offers a textbook designed to provide students with a solid knowledge of the main concepts in probability that they will need in such fields as statistics, operations research, and finance. They include event, sample space, random variable, distribution, and expectation. Another goal is to encourage good writing. Finding simulation to be a powerful pedagogical tool, he tailors the course to the popular mathematics software package, where simulation is easy. No date is noted for the first edition, but one of the reasons for this second is to account for the newest versions of Mathematica. The disk contains executable notebooks. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)