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Bioinformatics Books for the Technically Inclined?

Posted by Cliff on from the night-before-the-interview-reading dept.

bookEnders asks: "I hold a BS and MS in Biology. For the past 6 years, I have worked as a computer programmer not in field of Biology. I have an upcoming interview (several weeks from now) for a Bioinformatics programmer position. It appears to be a great job for me - a marriage of University training and professional experience. As LISP is a requirement, I have been burrowing through David Lamkins's Successful LISP tutorial. However, I am having trouble finding Bioinformatics books that are geared toward my skills: most are written for Biologists who don't know Linux or PERL. Others are written for Computer Scientists who don't know squat about Biology. I know enough about both that neither set of these books is too valuable. Can someone (hopefully those in the field) suggest reference or tutorial materials to help me prepare for this interview?"

5 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. What field is the job in? by Otter · · Score: 3, Informative
    As a biologist who struggles to keep up with informatics, I can sympathize. The problem is that the field is so new and so fast moving that good books are nearly impossible to write.

    What area of biology does the job involve? With that, people could give you more specific pointers. Failing that, I'd suggest going to some web sites -- NCBI, ensembl.org, genome.ucsc.edu -- and looking at what's around. (Of course, my list is biased towards sequence-based genomics. If the job you're eyeing is in proteomics or arrays or some other functional genomics, it won't help as much which is why it would be useful to have a more specific pointer.)

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  2. Bioinformatics Books by stelo · · Score: 2, Informative
    You should take a look at

    http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~stelo/pattern.html#Resource s

    under "Books". I agree that the there is no book that cover 100% of Bioinformatics, but a a subset of these will definitely do.
    I particularly like the book by Gusfield for the algorithms.
    Regarding Perl, you are probably aware of a new book by O'Reilly about "Perl for Bioinformatics"

    http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/begperlbio/

    Regards,
    Stefano

  3. Textbooks I've used by EthOnto · · Score: 2, Informative

    I sat in on a Bioinformatics course last spring. We used texts by Pevzner and Gusfield. I would recommend looking at Gusfield. It's definitely from the CS side, but that's probably more approach anyway, since you said the job required you to know Lisp, not how to run gels. Pevzner tries to straddle both sides, but doesn't always succeed. I would also second the Lisp in Biology site. P.

    --
    Ontologies for Ethology.... PEM
  4. Bioinformatics Books by glenix · · Score: 1, Informative

    I highly recommend "Bioinformatics: A Practical Guide to the Analysis of Genes and Proteins" by Baxevanis and Ouellette-published by Wiley-Interscience; "Bioinformatics: Methods and Protocols" by Misener and Krawetz-published by Hamana Press; and "Bioinformatics: The Machine Learning Approach" by Baldi and Bruank-published by MIT Press.

  5. Do a search at www.mightywords.com by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    There are three ebooks on the subject at www.mightywords.com

    Data Analysis for Bioinformatics : Part 1: Probability, Statistics, Information Theory, Clusters
    by Arun Jagota $10.00 Publisher: Arun Jagota Pub Date: 05/09/00

    Data Classification for Bioinformatics : Supervised Methods
    by Arun Jagota $10.00 Publisher: Arun Jagota Pub Date: 07/14/00

    Perl for Bioinformatics
    by Arun Jagota $9.95 Publisher: MightyWords Inc. Pub Date: 03/15/01