Customer Reviews

Bioinformatics Biocomputing and Perl: An Introduction to Bioinformatics Computing Skills and Practice

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I like this book as a tutorial. I am teaching myself Perl with this book. The chapter examples are good practice and the exercises at the end of the chapters are reasonable. I am about 1/4 through the book, and so far am enjoying the learning process.

I have been programming and working as a biologist for the past 6 years, but I have had only a small exposure to Perl. When I read this book description, I was excited since it indicated that Perl would be taught from the ground up and from the bioinformatics perspective. While the perspective is as advertised, this is still a terrible book. Unless you know something about Perl (and programming in general) before you begin, you will be lost. The authors organize some material well, but often relevant items are completely missing. They almost completely abandon Windows users when it would only take a few more sentences to address the difference between Unix and Windows. The end of chapter exercises are poorly thought out and do not provide sufficient practice for the novice. Frequently I found myself referring to "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" to make sense of the Moorhouse and Barry book.