In this book I have tried to present fundamental ideas, algorithms, and techniques that have a wide range of application and that will likely remain important even as the present-day interests change. I have also tried to explain the fundamental reasons why computations on strings and sequences are productive in biology and will remain important even as the specific applications change. But with only 500 pages (a mere 285,639 words formed from 1,784,996 characters), there are certain algorithmic methods and certain present and anticipated applications that I could not cover.

Additional techniques

For additional pure computer science results on exact matching, the reader is referred to Text Algorithms by M. Crochemore and W. Rytter [117]. That book goes more deeply into several pure computer science issues, such as periodicities in strings and parallel algorithms. For a survey of many string searching algorithms and inexact matching methods, see String Searching Algorithms by G. Stephen [421]. For additional topics in computational molecular biology, particularly probabilistic and statistical questions about strings and sequences, see An Introduction to Computational Biology by M. Waterman [461]. For another introduction to combinatorial and string problems in computational molecular biology, see Introduction to Computational Molecular Biology, by J. Setubal and J. Meidanis [402]. For topics in computational molecular biology more focused on issues of protein structure, see the chapter Computational Molecular Biology by A. Lesk in [297].