Fabien Campagne, PhD, is the head of a scientific laboratory working in the field of Bioinformatics. His laboratory develops computational approaches to help manage and analyze biological data (http: //campagnelab.org). Over the years, Dr. Campagne has led the development of several large-scale bioinformatics systems that take advantage of a wide range of software engineering and programming techniques. Dr. Campagne is routinely evaluating new approaches to software engineering and programming that can help his laboratory develop bioinformatics software more efficiently. He wrote this book because he found the MPS Language Workbench a very powerful open-source tool for programming and system design, which lacked a well-designed and accessible introductory and reference textbook.