An excellent book on the theory of ROC. Its an early book on the subject but the coverage is quite broad and extensive. i consider it still current information.

The book goes deeper into areas not normally covered in ROC explanations. For example it diagrams and explains how different gausian distriutions ( different std deviation) affects the shape of the "ideal" ROC curve. It helped me understand why my real data created ROC curves in Excel didnt quite look as good as all those nice textbook examples.

You'll like the theory it if you think like an engineer. Otherwise it could be considered fairly dry reading.
I would consider this book as an excellent reference book. Its early date gives it a nuts and bolts innocence. No new-age fluff or pyrotechnical fireworks of intellectual obsfucation. Good old fashioned information I can grasp.

You need to understand a bit of maths and statistics.

I would suggest that you use on-line tutorials on the subject first ( Introduction and tutorial material ) and then delve into the book. There are some excellent hands on , live, Java script ROC Graphs , on the net with which to learn from.

Search on the keywords Signal Detection Theory and ROC.

Recommended.