This book was specifically designed to keep all elements needed for understanding the fundamental research approaches used in bioinformatics in a single text. It aims to help future evolutionary biologists both on a conceptual level (in terms of picking up the correct method) and on a practical level (how to do it).

In terms of practical value, the book provides a short Unix tutorial (chapter 1) that may be useful to students who do not have previous experience outside of a Windows environment, along with some information about popular databases used in bioinformatics and some knowledge of basic statistics. The central concept of bioinformatics--sequence alignment--is discussed in chapter 2, followed by a discussion of the computation of exact matches in chapter 3. There the authors systematically present the various methods, from exact matching in time proportional to the length of sequence, to more advanced matching methods that are time independent of the sequence length. Further, the text discusses the concept of multiple sequence alignment and makes a transition to population genetics. Chapter 6 is the most advanced one in the book because the authors discuss coalescent trees--a method used in modern popular genetics, but not always discussed in basic bioinformatics textbooks.

The book includes more than 40 programs specifically designed for the course. Code is provided for three major operating systems (Unix/Linux, Windows, Mac OS), which omits any possible technological barriers the students may have. That fact along with 400 problems of different levels--from elementary to research--make it an invaluable textbook for evolutionary biology students studying bioinformatics.