On the topic of string research, one excellent reference that someone recommended to me is the book "Flexible Pattern Matching in Strings" by Navarro and Raffin

On the topic of string research, one excellent reference that someone recommended to me is the book "Flexible Pattern Matching in Strings" by Navarro and Raffinot. One of my favorite things about it is that it has a "phase change" graph at the end of each chapter, saying for each combination of alphabet size and pattern size, which algorithm fares better. It also favors algorithms that are simple to implement (such as Horspool instead of Boyer-Moore), because those also tend to be the fastest.