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List Price: £28.50
Our Price: £12.36
Author:
James Tisdall
By O'Reilly Media, Inc.
 Learn Bioinformatics in a week, 2008-04-30
This book beats it. At 40 years I turned my career from molecular plant biology to Bioinformatics. Obviously this book does not teach you how to do BI but with the basic biological knowledge I had and this book it really gets piece of cake. I actually started with a bit of Perl for Dummies, also good but I felt a bit lost after Chapter 7, went on with Tisdall's Beginning Perl and in half a day I ran my first scripts. It actually does explain what most things do (for instance what a filehandle is for). The clear English, the code available online all contribute to a learning BI on the fast track. It is specially the combination of text that does not go too deep, and the examples and exercises that guide you through dry material like it is all very simple, which it is of course.
Cum laude!
List Price: £24.99
Our Price: £20.34
Author:
Arthur Lesk
By OUP Oxford
A great introductory book, 2004-06-25
This is an excellent introduction to this up-and-coming field. Bioinformatics one of many fields that is inherently inter-disciplinary, with biologists coming in and needing to learn computer science, and computer scientists coming in and needing to learn biology. I think that the book is very useful for both groups. I have a computer science background and did not find any of the biology overly difficult. So I highly recommend it for anyone, from the undergraduate to the postrgraduate or professional. The book covers all of the major topics in bioinformatics, and touches on several of the minor ones. There are 5 long chapters:
Chapter 1 Introduction: introduces the basics of the field, describing the basics of data archiving, the WWW, computers and computer programming, biological classification and nomenclature, phylogenetic relationships and use of sequences, PSI-BLAST, and protein structure.
Chapter 2 Genome organization and evolution: genomics and proteomics, methods of genetic information transmission, genes and genomes, SNPs, genome evolution.
Chapter 3 Archives and information retrieval: this contains a detailed discussion of various databases and how to interact with them.
Chapter 4 Alignments and phylogenetic trees: this vast majority of this chapter covers many aspects of the important area of sequence alignment, including BLAST and HMMs. Then it has short sections on phylogeny and phylogenetic trees, again covering the basics.
Chapter 5 Protein structure and drug discovery: this starts with protein folding, and deals with hydrophobicity, structural alignments, DALI, and then evolution, classification and prediction of protein structures and function. Finally it touches on drug discovery in this context. One of the nice things about this book is the code samples, written in the bioinformatician's favorite language, Perl. These are printed and discussed in the book, but then also available on the web site that is associated with the book, so you don't have to type it in yourself. In addition to the programs, the website also has graphics from the book, many of which rotate so you can see them from different positions (can't get that in a book!). It also has the web links mentioned in the book, so you can explore them more conveniently than having to flip through the book and type the URLs in.
List Price: £50.00
Our Price: £35.00
Author:
Hans-Joachim Bockenhauer, Dirk Bongartz
By Springer-Verlag Berlin and Heidelberg GmbH & Co. K
The best bioinformatics algorithm book, 2007-06-19
I own the German version of this book and had a look at the English translation. This book covers the major algorithms in bioinformatics in a clear and understandable fashion.
The chapters deal with basic concepts of Strings, Graphs, and Algorithms; String Algorithms; Alignment Methods; DNA Sequencing; Physical Mapping; Finding Signals in DNA Sequences; Genome Rearrangements; Phylogenetic Trees; RNA Secondary Structure Prediction; Protein Structure Prediction. The authors thus cover the core topics of any bioinformatics course.
The reader is not required to have a lot of background in mathematics or statistics and I very much favour this book over "Biological Sequence Analysis: Probabilistic Models of Proteins and Nucleic Acids" by Durbin/Eddy/Krogh/Mitchison.
The book is about algorithms in bioinformatics, it therefore does not cover websites and does not give advice on using public services (in case you are a biologist looking for a book to help analyzing your data, have a look at "Bioinformatics: A Practical Guide to the Analysis of Genes and Proteins" by Baxevanis/Ouellette, ISBN 0471478784). The book also does not cover the analysis of gene networks, protein networks or expression data. However, in terms of presenting the core bioinformatics algorithms for sequence and structure analysis it does a perfect job.
List Price: £54.00
Our Price: £40.33
By Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
If you do microarrays-- buy this., 2006-06-22
Honestly-- all the other Bioinformatics books of the past few years are rubbish. This is the only one that I've ever found of any practical use. It is vital if you are working with microarrays as the best methods are in Bioconductor and the code here is very useful.
Best bought together with
Modern Applied Statistics with S (Statistics & Computing S.) ~ W.N. Venables, B.D. Ripley -- unles you know R/S very well.
List Price: £56.87
Our Price: £34.49
By Prentice Hall
Excellent product, well supported by both Mathworks and the community, 2007-12-14
Matlab has become very popular in the engineering field. Whilst both Maple and Mathematica have stronger symbolic capabilities, Matlab excels in the numerics and so tends to be used for engineering more than pure maths.
The Matlab documentation is built into the program and is also available online. There is a very active newsgroup comp.soft-sys.matlab where Matlab users can ask for help. It is read by a lot of staff from Mathworks and they, or other Matlab users, answer questions quickly. The importance of good support on this sort of software can not be overstated. This is a serious issue with Mathematica, which is a similar(ish) product to Matlab. The Mathematica newsgroup is moderated, so help requests can take a day before anyone sees them. To get a satisfactory answer to a question can often take a long time.
Matlab is excellent value for money for students, being cheaper than the student versions of either Maple or Mathematica. Although this is is a "sprat to catch a mackerel", as the commercial version of Matlab is expensive. This student version includes various toolboxes and Simulink, all of which are optional extras if you buy the commercial version.
The commercial version of Matlab is available on Solaris, but only Windows, Linux and Mac are supported on the student version. Since I used Solaris as a student, I would have found this annoying. There would be no harm in asking if they would give a license for Solaris.
List Price: £19.99
Our Price: £9.36
Author:
Claverie, JeanMichel Ph. D., Notredame, Cedric Ph.D.
By John Wiley & Sons
Clear and informative, 2005-12-26
So much of the information is this field (and indeed some of the applications which have been developed) seems almost intentially convoluted and difficult to understand. This book gives a very good overview of some of the more common programs that one will need to use if one is starting bioinformatics research in a way that is practical and easy understand. Despite the title, the authors have done some good work in the field (I use Notredame's T-Coffee alignment program often) and are credible authorities in this area.
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