This series of books covers all areas of computational physics, collecting together reviews where a newcomer can learn about the state of the art regarding methods and results. Articles are submitted by e-mail before deadlines which are kept by the editor.Biologically motivated simulations, glasses, world-record molecular dynamics, deposition on surfaces, and hydrodynamics are discussed in this volume which ends with an explanation of elementary particle physics (QCD) and their phase transitions.

In this fifth volume of the authoritative series, the simulation of forest fires, flames, and hydrodynamics is presented in the first three articles. The next two deal with quantum simulations, in particular for two dimensions (quantum Hall effect and monolayers). Biology is connected with the last two articles: we learn from biological evolution to complement computer hardware and software with evolware, or we simulate immunology.

This volume is based on an international school on ?Scaling and Disordered Systems? organized by M R H Khajehpour, M R Kolahchi and M Sahimi. Despite the common theme, it covers fields as diverse as basic and applied percolation, and biological prey-predator and ageing simulations. The advantages of computer simulation thus become particularly clear in the reviews, which have been written by leading experts.

Quantum phenomena and methods are the core of this volume in our series which publishes rapidly reviews of topics in computational physics. In addition, we look at phase transitions in Ising lattices, in continuum fluids, polymer solutions, and end with biological ageing. As before, papers were submitted by e-mail, and these files were used directly to produce the book, for increased speed and reliability.

The sixth volume of the series covers topics ranging from the generation of good random numbers to statistical physics, quantum mechanics, quantum computers and polymers, to protein folding and immunology simulations. It should thus be of interest not only to computational physicists but also to experts in computer science as well as theoretical biology.

The ninth volume of Annual Reviews of Computational Physics has as a special feature a comprehensive compendium of interatomic potentials as used for materials properties. Other articles deal with simulations of magnetic nanostructures, improved Monte Carlo methods (e.g. for nucleation studies in Ising models), fluid dynamics with large mean free paths, the growing field of OC sociophysics, OCO and teaching of undergraduate computational physics (including an introduction to Java)."