This book is a nearly hundred percent faithful book adaptation of the author's Ph.D. dissertation. It narrates, in the style of a scientific report, the history of the development of the protein secondary structure prediction tool SPARROW, the culmination of the author's doctoral work. The origins of the name, SPARROW, deserve perhaps a few lines for themselves. The acronym was in fact the first to be chosen. It was meant as a sort of fiction-inspired taunt directed at the (probably unaware) author of the main competing software, PSIPRED. Let us hope it will bring it luck.