Customer Reviews

BioInformatics: A Computing Perspective

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Overall, this book serves as a decent springboard into further exploration of topics in bioinformatics. It gives a broad sampling of the terms and basic techniques in the field, making the reader conversant enough to research the details elsewhere. This level of involvement is probably the best approach for an emerging field like bioinformatics, where the rules of the game are hardly written down before they change again.

On the other hand, I had several issues with this book. For one, it seemed like a rough draft in many places. In addition to some copyediting issues and stylistic inconsistencies, a few of the illustrations were poorly constructed and unclear.

The book aims (according to the back cover) to be a "standalone text" focusing on the computing side of bioinformatics, but with relevant background in biology and mathematics. Though it handled computing, math, and statistics fairly well, I felt that the biology side of the material was lacking, and sometimes even off the mark. The authors have a tendency to make analogies to computing whenever they try to explain a biological process. This is not necessarily a bad idea, but they often spend too much time on the analogies rather than the actual explanation, confusing the issue by bogging down the reader in the parts that did not correspond. My recommendation: more (and better) illustrations, and fewer analogies.

Even the computing part had some problems. The exercises were all over the place. Some were trivial and had tenuous relevance ("decode this Morse code message using a table"), while others were large programming projects with latent, difficult graph theory problems. Meanwhile, a few code listings demonstrated horrible programming practices (a state machine implemented with recursive function calls, anyone?). Moreover, they were all written in Java, which is fine in itself--choose a language and stick with it--but the text sometimes referred to Java idiosyncrasies that made discussions inapplicable to other languages.

I do not want to make this book sound worthless. It had many good qualities, and it was certainly valuable as a starting point. Still, I think the authors and the publisher need to consider some major revisions to many of its sections. I hope that there will be further editions that address some of these issues: the book has lots of potential that is mired by its rough edges.

I bought this book outside USA, with different cover. I am a computer software developer, and I had very little knowledge about biology. This was my first book to start reading in the Bioinformatics field. At first, I gave up reading it, and I tried to read many other book. However, in the end, I came back to this book, and found this book can answer all the questions I had while I was attempting to read other books.

What this book is good is that this book tries to explain things from the computer engineer's point of view. This does not attempt to cover the deep inside of neither pure mathematics nor pure biology. It cover both areas with good-enough-base for the computer engineer like us. Computer engineer can gain the foundation to start their new career by reading this book seamlessly.

MY first review. For this newly published book, there is not much to say. If you are familiar with the logrithms and biochemistry, it's a good text book. What I want to say is that this is a very nice shopper, unbilievable fast delivery, and cheapest price for this book in nice condition.