Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, ESA 2009, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in September 2009 in the context of the combined conference ALGO 2009. The 67 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected: 56 papers out of 222 submissions for the design and analysis track and 10 out of 36 submissions in the engineering and applications track. The papers are organized in topical sections on trees, geometry, mathematical programming, algorithmic game theory, navigation and routing, graphs and point sets, bioinformatics, wireless communiations, flows, matrices, compression, scheduling, streaming, online algorithms, bluetooth and dial a ride, decomposition and covering, algorithm engineering, parameterized algorithms, data structures, and hashing and lowest common ancestor.