This is a surprisingly complete practical text. It can be appreciated by computer literate novices as well as by practicing bioinformaticians. Each chapter can, in principle, be read separately from others but reading entire book from cover to cover could be a better strategy for the readers who would like to become professional computational biologists in the future. It would be good if future editions of this handbook contained a more elaborated description of contents and a more exhaustive index. This could facilitate navigating through this quite large text. That is to say the subject index in the current edition is all right but could be improved in the future. It would also be nice if the publisher could make this excellent book affordable for a larger audience by lowering the price.