The objective of this book is to provide an introduction for graduate students and other newcomers to the field of nearshore hydrodynamics that describes the basics and helps de-mystify some of the many research results only found in journals, reports and conference proceedings. When I decided to write this book I thought this would be a fairly easy task. From many years of teaching and research in the field of nearshore hydrodynamics I had extensive notes about the major topics and I thought it would be a straight forward exercise to expand the notes into a text that would meet that objective.