Suggested Reading for Chapter Three: What is an EA?

T. Bäck. Evolutionary Algorithms in Theory and Practice. Oxford University Press, New York, 1996
T. Bäck, H.-P. Schwefel. An overview of Evolutionary Algorithms for parameter optimisation. Evolutionary Computation, 1:1 pp. 1–23, 1993. One of the first papers to really unify historically isolated strands of EA research within a common framework.
A.E. Eiben. Evolutionary computing: the most powerful problem solver in the universe? Dutch Mathematical Archive (Nederlands Archief voor Wiskunde), 5/3:2 pp. 126–131, 2002
Available at http://www.cs.vu.nl/~gusz/papers/ec-intro-naw.pdf
D.B. Fogel. Evolutionary Computation. IEEE Press, 1995
M.S. Hillier, F.S. Hillier. Conventional optimization techniques.
Chapter 1, pp. 3–25 in Sarker et al., Eds. Evolutionary Optimization, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston. 2002. Provides a background on other methods to place EC in context
X.~Yao. Evolutionary computation: A gentle introduction. Chapter 2, pp.~27–53 in Sarker et al., Eds. Evolutionary Optimization, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston. 2002.

Introduction to Evolutionary Computing