This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, ESA 2000, held in Saarbrücken, Germany in September 2000. The 39 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Among the topics addressed are parallelism, distributed systems, approximation, combinatorial optimization, computational biology, computational geometry, external-memory algorithms, graph algorithms, network algorithms, online algorithms, data compression, symbolic computation, pattern matching, and randomized algorithms.