String matching has a wide variety of uses, both within computer science and in computer applications from business to science. This book covers string matching in 40 short chapters. After an introductory chapter, each succeeding chapter describes an exact string-matching algorithm. First, the main features of an algorithm are listed, and then the algorithm is described and its computational complexity is given. Next, C code is given, and, finally, a worked-out example of the execution of the algorithm is presented. Each chapter is accompanied by references. The descriptions are rather short, but to the point, although they may not always be sufficient for someone new to the field (for example, this is true for the descriptions of the Boyer-Moore and Apostolico-Giancarlo algorithms). Sometimes more than one example should have been provided to show the full range of an algorithm. Nevertheless, the book is an excellent overview of the area of exact string matching.

As stated in the title, the book is limited to exact string matching. Approximate string matching is not covered. Only algorithms for finding all occurrences of one pattern in a text are discussed. Algorithms for matching multiple patterns (for example, the Aho-Corasick algorithm) are not included, nor is there any discussion of algorithms that utilize suffix trees.

The Handbook is really a book version of the Web site the authors have maintained for many years (http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/string). However, in addition to what can be found in the book, the site has Java applets for demonstrating the step-by-step execution of all the algorithms. A text and a pattern can be entered by the user. These applets are an excellent addition to this great book.