Safety and reliability engineers responsible for the design of maritime structures can find in Goda's book all necessary background information for the probabilistic description of loads on those structures. No other book currently exists which gives such a complete overview of all methods to describe random sea waves, with particular attention to the extreme waves. This second edition (2000) contains a number of extensions w.r.t. the first edition (1985) and some sections have been rewritten. The reviewer especially enjoyed studying Goda's outline on correlation models between successive wave heights, marginal probability density functions of wave periods, and joint distributions of wave heights and periods of waves with narrow-band spectra.