Designed as an introduction to the field of computational methods for comparative and functional genomics, this text explains the computer methods from the user's viewpoint, without the details of the math and algorithms. The history of the field, various genome sequencing projects, the conceptual basis of the field, evolutionary principles of protein function assignments, and databases of genomic data are the book's main topics. Both authors are affiliated with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.