increasingly critical ingredient of asset and fund management, while at the same time portfolio risk assessment has become an essential ingredient in risk management, and this trend will only accelerate in the coming years. Unfortunately there is a large gap between the limited treatment of portfolio construction methods that are presented in most university courses with relatively little hands-on experience and limited computing tools, and the rich and varied aspects of portfolio construction that are used in practice in the finance industry. Current practice demands the use of modern methods of portfolio construction that go well beyond the classical Markowitz mean-variance optimality theory and require the use of powerful scalable numerical optimization methods. This book fills the gap between current university instruction and current industry practice by providing a comprehensive computationally-oriented treatment of modern portfolio optimization and construction methods. The computational aspect of the book is based on extensive use of S-Plus®, the S+NuOPT# optimization module, the S-Plus Robust Library and the S+Bayes# Library, along with about 100 S-Plus scripts and some CRSP® sample data sets of stock returns. A special time-limited version of the S-Plus software is available to purchasers of this book.