Sean Rice's Evolutionary Theory is an excellent journey through the mathematical foundations of evolutionary biology. The book covers a wide array of theory, including single locus models, drift, Price's Theorem, game theory, and multilevel selection. Despite the often intense content, the book is written with a great, economical style that is easy to read. More importantly, the consistent presentation of such a broad collection of theory highlights the unifying principles of evolution.

This book serves as a great primer on evolutionary theory and, no doubt, I will be refering to it often as a reference text. Evolutionary biology has benefited greatly from a strong theoretical basis. Rice's book continues that tradition.

"Modern Applied Statistics with S" provides a comprehensive introduction to the use of S in either of its implementations (S-PLUS or R). I have found it to be an indespensible resource when I use R. The authors work through a variety of major topics in statistics and demonstrate the use of S with sample code and datasets. To be clear, however, this book was not written as an introduction to statistics. You'll need to look elsewhere for such a book. Consider "Experiments in Ecology: Their Logical Design and Interpretation Using Analysis of Variance" by Underwood or "Applied Linear Statistical Models" by Neter et al. for two excellent but completely different approaches.

I would recommend this book to any Canadian interested in our nation's place in the world. This book examines the foundation behind many of our national myths and demonstrates the decline in our stature and influence. The book isn't simply a litany of problems, it also suggests what could be done to improve the situation. At the very least, these issues deserve a national debate, not the gradual decline through neglect that is currently happening.