Takakura, T. and Fang, W. Climate under cover. 2nd edition

This is the second edition of a book first written by Professor Takakura in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It formed a course, for graduate students, on the simulation of the physical environments for crops under covers. As such it is a well‐integrated whole. It gives a context for the use of covers of all types, from soil mulches to fully automated greenhouses. It lays out the physical principles and links them to the biological processes. And it turns this all into equations and computer code, with diagrams to display the output of simulations. To complete the functional form of the book, there are problems at the end of each chapter, which would ensure the student followed through key parts of the subject. This is, therefore, a very focused book, whose audience would be those wishing to understand, in quantitative terms, the dynamics of such environments and how they can be controlled. It is very much oriented to late undergraduate and graduate level teaching, with a strong commitment to IT approaches. The extensive use of computer code throughout the text—it makes up more than 20 % of the volume—may be a little off‐putting, but it is integral to the authors’ approach. In fact, the need for a second edition is substantially because of the changes in software. The 1992 edition was based around programs written in the simulation language CSMP, widely used in the 1980s and earlier. However, that approach is now history. The new edition has been switched to MATLAB, which is a dominant approach for simulation now. Is printed code useful? It is difficult to believe that it is, given the computational basis for the whole approach, and the access to a web site, which provides all the models listed in the book. So, we are talking here about a teaching and training approach, with a hard copy book providing the background, the scientific underpinning and the problems to challenge the student. The web site gives the code, and allows bugs to be resolved as practitioners use the approaches. It looks a very effective way to get maximum value for a detailed technical area that will be of interest around the world.