This book, a new fully revised and updated edition of the Dutch classic Vademecum Ergonomie, offers an excellent practical introduction for anyone who feels ergonomics can bring benefits to people and the performance of tasks in work and domestic environments. Professionals working in occupational health and safety, human resource and personnel managers, design engineers, management consultants, and indeed the lay person will find the book's breadth of coverage encompass the essentials of applying ergonomics successfully. Embracing the concepts of designing tasks and environments for human comfort and satisfaction as well as optimum performance, the book shows, in an accessible and easily understandable fashion the steps by which managers, workers, and users can achieve an appropriate balance.

The book includes anthropometric tables, criteria to create interesting and satisfying jobs, recommendations for the safe and efficient lifting, handling and carrying of loads, guidelines for working with computers, instructions for the effective presentation of information, specifications for comfortable sitting and standing postures, measures to reduce the adverse effects of the environment, and proposals for the role of ergonomists in project teams.

In the light of recent and forthcoming legislation, and the growing public interest in and awareness of ergonomics and human factors, the book could not have appeared at a better time: it is an essential and invaluable edition to anyone's bookshelf, at work or at home.

Jan Dul works for the TNO Institute of Preventative Health care in Leiden as an ergonomics researcher and is head of the Department of Posture and Movement Research.

Bernard WeerdMeester works at Usable, a private consultancy bureau on software ergonomics in The Hague as a consultant.