Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, ESA 2006, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in September 2006, in the context of the combined conference ALGO 2006. The 70 revised full papers presented together with abstracts of 3 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 287 submissions. The papers address all current subjects in algorithmics, reaching from design and analysis issues of algorithms over to real-world applications and engineering of algorithms in various fields.