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Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills
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Author: Cynthia Gibas, Per Jambeck
List Price: $34.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1565926641
Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates (15 April, 2001)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 28,421
Average Customer Rating: 3.38 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
Good introduction, somewhat uneven
This book is a good introduction to Bioinformatics and to what it takes to get started in the field. Some reviewers deride it as too superficial or as too Unix-centric, but I think those are two of its strengths. The authors lay no claim to having written the definitive work on the subject of Bioinformatics, and they freely admit that they come in with a certain bias. If you are serious about Bioinformatics this won't be your last book anyway, but it'll get you started.That said, I found the material a bit uneven. The authors tend to jump from almost trivial stuff to very complex in a heartbeat, and they sometimes use a concept or command before it can be properly understood One example: Introducing the Unix commands head and tail, then moving on to split and csplit. The introduction to regular expressions as needed by csplit follows a few pages later. Nevertheless, I plan to use this book as a companion text to my own sequence of computer classes for biologists, and I think it will serve that purpose very well.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Useful only for a reference book
We are all well aware that it is impossible to write a book on bioinformatics satisfying all types of readers. That is the reason why we are spending much time on finding a book that we can say "This book is just for me!"Well, this book is not a self-teaching book by itself. Don't expect that things will become clear to understand after reading this book. If your expectation is just to taste flavor of bioinformatics and to use it as a reference book, then this book is right for you.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Quite good introduction
This is a quite good book for people who have little background in Bioinformatics or Computer Science. I have to say it was pretty good in introducing basic ideas in Bioinformatics, and online resources.However, I think the authors can do a better job in providing more details in certain areas, for example, in Perl programming, and in sequence alignment. Some parts of the book is so simple that the contents in those parts are not quite useful. I would recommend this book to people who are new to Bioinformatics. But not to people who have taken one or two
introductory classes.
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