- 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.
The on-line accompaniment to the book Introduction to Evolutionary Computing