Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Latin American Symposium on Theoretical Informatics, LATIN 2010, held in Oaxaca, Mexico; in April 2010. The 56 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of 4 invited plenary talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 155 submissions. The papers address a variety of topics in theoretical computer science with a certain focus on algorithms, automata theory and formal languages, coding theory and data compression, algorithmic graph theory and combinatorics, complexity theory, computational algebra, computational biology, computational geometry, computational number theory, cryptography, theoretical aspects of databases and information retrieval, data structures, networks, logic in computer science, machine learning, mathematical programming, parallel and distributed computing, pattern matching, quantum computing and random structures.