Overview

This book contains a collection of quantitative procedures in common use in pharmacology and related disciplines. It is intended for students and researchers in all fields who work with drugs. Many physicians, especially those concerned with clinical pharmacology, will also find much that is useful. The procedures included may be considered "core" since they are generally applicable to all classes of drugs. Some of the procedures deal with statistics and, hence, have even wider application. In this new edition we have increased the number of procedures from 33 (in the first edition) to 48. Other procedures have been revised and expanded. Yet the basic philosophy of this new edition remains unchanged from the first. That is, the pharmacologic basis of each procedure is presented, along with the necessary formulas and one or more worked examples. An associated computer program is included for each procedure and its use is illustrated with the same worked example used in the text. The discussions of theory and the sample computations are brief and self-contained, so that all computations can be made with the aid of a pocket calculator and the statistical tables contained in Appendix A. Yet it is realized that the proliferation of lower-priced microcom- puters is likely to mean that more and more readers will utilize a computer for most calculations. Accordingly, we have modified the format of the book to facilitate computer usage.