Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Jerry Banks retired in 1999 as a professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, after which he worked as senior simulation technology advisor for Brooks Automation; he is currently an independent consultant. He is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of eleven books, one set of proceedings, several chapters in texts, and numerous technical papers. He is the editor of the Handbook of Simulation, published in 1998 by John Wiley, which won the award for Excellence in Engineering Handbooks from the Professional Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers, Inc. He is also author or coauthor of Getting Started with AutoMod, Second Edition, Introduction to SIMAN V and CINEMA V, Getting Started with GPSSIHH, Second Edition, Forecasting and Management of Technology and Principles of Quality Control. He was a founding partner in the simulation-consulting firm Carson/Banks & Associates, Inc., which was purchased by AutoSimulations, Inc. (now part of Brooks Automation). He is a full member of many technical societies, among them the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE); he served eight years as that organization's representative to the Board of the Winter Simulation Conference, including two years as board chair. He is the recipient of the INFORMS College on Simulation Distinguished Service Award for 1999 and was named a fellow of HE in 2002.
I've been using this as reference for a CS class on simulation, and it has been a __life_saver__. Some authors just assault you with equations, then wave their hands in the air as an explanation. But here, everything is in plain English. And while the material's not easy, it can be grasped after some close reading. Very trite, but it's made the subject fun. PLUS: Solutions for the exercises are available online with some clever Googling. Check it.
I read this book for self-study to get an idea as to how discrete event simulation worked. This book was pretty good for that. The application chapters at the end of the text weren't terribly useful as it seems like they exist to motivate a lab section or assignments in a university course. Some of the statistics-oriented sections did full calculation demos in the text. While a good idea in principle, these also dragged on quite a bit. Still it was a good, complete text for getting a handle on these concepts.
This is a fairly good book on the subject of experimental modeling and simulation. It does help go have a background in stats and there is some calculus in the book, not to mention a strong understanding of programming.