Yet Another GA Book

I recently came across this book: "Practical Genetic Algorithms". I already studied 3 chapters, and found it really intresting. As the name implies it has a practical approach in which the authors try to explain the implementation details of GA.

In most of the GA books I've ever read the discussion of GA operators such as crossover or mutation is vague. Statements like "Mutation is to change non-junk part of the chromosome with some probability" are everywhere, and there is usually no distinction between real-valued and binary GAs. Conversely this books explains all these different variations with reasonable detail, and has good references to relevant papers. For example the book clearly describes different types of selection methods, different variations of crossover and mutation in both real-valued, and binary GAs, and for all of these it has references to papers where a more in-depth discussion could be found.

In short this book is a pragmatic tutorial on GA which has a good balance between theory an practice.

I guess anybody who has every worked with a GA can borrow a lot of ideas from this book in order to fine tune their implementation.