The world’s most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the million-selling What If? and Thing Explainer

For any task you might want to do, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It’s full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole.

"How strange science can fix everyday problems" - New Scientist

"A brilliant book: clamber in for a wild ride" - Nature

"An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation" - Kirkus Reviews

"Consistently fascinating and entertaining" - Wall Street Journal

"Required reading across the world" - New York Times

"A great deal of fun" - The Economist

"Fascinating" - Guardian

"Extremely accurate and often amusing answers to everyday issues" - Daily Mail

"A pure delight, a salty-sweet mixture of hard science and bonkers whimsy" - Boing Boing

"The creator of the popular, extremely excellent webcomic xkcd cleverly illustrates a guide of complicated solutions to simple tasks as common as digging a hole" - USA Today

"[How To] tackles problems from the mundane-such as how to move to a new house-to those that may trouble a mad scientist building her first lava moat. The solutions are often hilariously, and purposefully, absurd. Embedded in these solutions, however, is solid scientific, engineering, and experimental understanding . . . [for] anyone who appreciates science-based solutions to life's problems" - Science Magazine

"A witty, educational examination of 'unusual approaches to common tasks' . . . generously laced with dry humor . . . Munroe's comic stick-figure art is an added bonus. . . . Apart from generating laughter, the book also manages to achieve his serious objective: to get his audience thinking" - Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A gleefully nerdy hypothetical instruction book for armchair scientists of all ages" - Booklist

"Ridiculous, delightful and, damn it, educational" - Sunday Times (Culture)

Randall Munroe is the creator of the webcomic xkcd and bestselling author of What If?, Thing Explainer and xkcd: Volume 0. Randall was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, and grew up outside Richmond, Virginia. After studying physics at Christopher Newport University, he got a job building robots at NASA Langley Research Center. In 2006 he left NASA to draw comics on the internet full time, and has since been nominated for a Award three times. The International Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid after him: asteroid 4942 Munroe is big enough to cause mass extinction if it ever hits a planet like Earth.