It is a tribute to our profession that a textbook that was current in 1999 is starting to feel old. The work for the first edition of Monte Carlo Statistical Methods (MCSM1) was finished in late 1998, and the advances made since then, as well as our level of understanding of Monte Carlo methods, have grown a great deal. Moreover, two other things have happened. Topics that just made it into MCSM1 with the briefest treatment (for example, perfect sampling) have now attained a level of importance that necessitates a much more thorough treatment. Secondly, some other methods have not withstood the test of time or, perhaps, have not yet been fully developed, and now receive a more appropriate treatment. When we worked on MCSM1 in the mid-to-late 90s, MCMC algorithms were already heavily used, and the flow of publications on this topic was atsuch a high level that the picture was not only rapidly changing, but also necessarily incomplete. Thus, the process that we followed in MCSM1 was that of someone who was thrown into the ocean and was trying to grab onto the biggest and most seemingly useful objects while trying to separate the flotsam from the jetsam. Nonetheless, we also felt that the fundamentals of many of these algorithms were clear enough to be covered at the textbook alevel, so we" swam on.
