This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Latin American Symposium on Theoretical Informatics, LATIN 2008, held in B?zios, Brazil, in April 2008.

The 66 revised full papers presented together with the extended abstract of 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 242 submissions. The papers address a veriety 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.