This book is intended as a self-contained guide to the entire field of bioinformatics, interpreted as the application of information science to biology. There is a strong underlying belief that information is a profound concept underlying biology, and familiarity with the concepts of information should make it possible to gain many important new insights into biology. In other words, the vision underpinning this book goes beyond the narrow interpretation of bioinformatics sometimes encoun- tered, which may confine itself to specific tasks such as the attempted identification of genes in a DNA sequence.