The stone fruits, including peaches, apricots, almonds, plums and cherries, have been bred and grown for thousands of years and today are significant agricultural crops in many local economies worldwide providing important components to healthy diets. This volume, comprising 14 chapters authored by 37 scientists from 7 countries, presents a comprehensive commentary on classical genetics and breeding; molecular mapping and breeding of agronomic traits; cloning of genes of interest; recent advances on 'omics' sciences including structural and functional genomics, proteomics and metabolomics with an enumeration on the whole genome sequencing of the model fruit plant peach; and application of bioinformatic strategies and tools for stone fruit research.