"[The book] presents theoretical results on the structure of local and global maxima and indicates how these results can be used for adding horsepower to the DC approach...It should be mentioned that all central chapters of the book include experimental evaluations of the DC algorithms. The experimental results indicate that the DC approach is highly competitive to existing approaches, and often outperforms them. The book should be of great interest to theoreticians and to practitioners. On one hand, it presents strong structural results (in particular the ones about submodular functions in Chapter 2), on the other hand it does a great job in algorithm engineering. The DC approach seems to come very close to a mature technology for (heuristically) solving a reasonably wide range of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems." -Hans-Ulrich Simon , Mathematical Reviews