The past six years have seen a substantial increase in the attention paid by research workers to the principles of experimental design. The Second Edition of brings this handbook up to date, while retaining the basic framework that made it so popular. Describes the most useful of the designs that have been developed with accompanying plans and an account of the experimental situations for which each design is most suitable. Examples come from diverse fields of research, with an emphasis on biology and agriculture, two of the authors' specialties. New chapters have been added: one discusses the fractional replication of experiments. A second is concerned with experiments of the factorial type that present new methods and designs in which the factors represent quantitative variables measured on a continuous scale. Other new material includes an introductory account of experimental strategies for finding the levels at which the factors must be set in order to obtain maximum response and coverage of new incomplete block designs.

William Gemmell Cochran was a prominent statistician. He was born in Scotland but spent most of his life in the United States. Cochran studied mathematics at the University of Glasgow and the University of Cambridge. He worked at Rothamsted Experimental Station from 1934 to 1939, when he moved to the United States.

Gertrude Mary Cox was an American statistician and founder of the department of Experimental Statistics at North Carolina State University.