'This book fills an important gap in the bioinformatics literature and should be required reading for anyone who is interested in doing serious work in biological sequence analysis. For biologists who have little formal training in statistics or probability, it is a long-awaited contribution that, short of consulting a professional statistician who is well versed in molecular biology, is the best source of statistical information that is relevant to sequence-alignment problems. This book seems destined to become a classic. I highly recommend it.' Andrew F. Neuwald, Trends in Biochemical Sciences