Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills

The 5-star ratings are obvious shills (one reviewer wrote a very long review and has never reviewed anything else)


Good introduction, somewhat uneven   December 18, 2003
Christoph Weber (San Diego, CA USA)
4 out of 6 found this review helpful

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.


Useful only for a reference book   December 2, 2003
Seungwoo Hwang (Albany, NY USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful

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.


Quite good introduction   October 3, 2003
doudou1229 (Irvine, CA United States)
3 out of 6 found this review helpful

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.


A Great Book For Exploring the Bioinformatics Field   April 16, 2003
Bruce Pechman
9 out of 16 found this review helpful

It's no deep secret many Information Technology (IT) professionals today are facing a rough road finding gainful employment. In fact, according to Information Week, nearly 10% of the US IT workforce vanished in the last two months of 2002. More aptly put, some 272,530 American IT professionals in October were unemployed by December. This data is corroborated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Where did they all go? Many almost certainly got jobs in other professions and many still could be seeking employment. Employment counselors are encouraging IT professionals to "repurpose" those hard earned tech skills.

Bioinformatics is a ripe apple waiting to be eaten. Bioinformatics simply stated is the computational and analytical methods to biological problems. If this sounds like an open ended explanation, it is. In fact, according to O'Reilly's definitive publication on the topic, "Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills" by Cynthia Gibas and Per Jambeck, there are several different definitions to Bioinformatics, but suffice to say all revolve around applying IT to the management of biological data.

Chapters one through six delineate the basics including the typical and common software and hardware requirements for Bioinformatics. I will tell you right now if you want to be successful in this fresh field, you must learn Unix. The book points out why. Unix is used extensively in universities and academia where the abundance of software for scientific data analysis is developed. Not to mention in the mid nineties, the only workstations able to visualize protein data structure in real-time were Silicon Graphics and Sun Unix workstations. Linux fans rejoice! As the book points out, "Linux is an excellent platform for developing software, so there's a rich library of tools available for computational biology and research in general."

Sound interesting? At this point you could be overwhelmed and ask yourself, "Where do I start?" Well, you may want to purchase O'Reilly's "Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills" to see what the fuss is all about, determine whether you have what it takes to succeed in this new field, and most importantly, get an introduction to the software tools for biological applications from the inside out. Bioinformatics is a growing field that will continue for the unforeseeable future.

If you're serious about turning around that stagnant IT career and expanding your education, you may find yourself in the same enviable position you were three years ago...needed and wanted! But don't let me mislead you. As the book points out, Bioinformatics is first and foremost a biological science.