Book excerpt: Reactive Search and Intelligent Optimization is an excellent introduction to the main principles of reactive search, as well as an attempt to develop some fresh intuition for the approaches. The book looks at different optimization possibilities with an emphasis on opportunities for learning and self-tuning strategies. While focusing more on methods than on problems, problems are introduced wherever they help make the discussion more concrete, or when a specific problem has been widely studied by reactive search and intelligent optimization heuristics. Individual chapters cover reacting on the neighborhood; reacting on the annealing schedule; reactive prohibitions; model-based search; reacting on the objective function; relationships between reactive search and reinforcement learning; and much more. Each chapter is structured to show basic issues and algorithms; the parameters critical for the success of the different methods discussed; and opportunities for the automated tuning of these parameters.