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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?"

2 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. Bioinformatics Links by lfettner · · Score: 2, Insightful

    http://www.biolisp.org has a lot of information about Lisp and bioinformatics on their site...resources and code that you can play with. Franz Inc. also has a free "Basic Lisp Techniques" book that can be downloaded, and BioDB-Loader, a toolkit created by Peter Karp of SRI for loading and querying databases.

  2. Biological Sequence Analysis by woggo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    by Durbin et al. (Cambridge) is a good bet. It's mostly about the central algorithms (Smith-Waterman, Baum-Welch, etc.) -- as a LISP wonk, you'll be able to implement them efficiently.