Since the editors wrote in the preface that 'large sequencing centers such as the Joint Genome Institute ... can sequence a prokaryotic genome within a day', this has now come within the reach of smaller laboratories too. How to deal with all the data? This book goes a fair way towards answering this question. Most topics are covered well, though the content is inevitably biased towards the authors' own software and databases. The frequent grammatical problems such as missing articles ('the', 'a') and some minor errors in the content (e.g. the description of four files representing each Pfam family, p. 216) are not too detracting from the main message. As an introduction to bioinformatics applied to bacterial genomics, I narrowly prefer David Ussery et al.'s Computing for Comparative Microbial Genomics, but I will be keeping the Xu and Gogarten book on the shelf above my desk as reference for some time to come.