Customer Reviews

Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Unlike the previous review, I found the user perspective, rather than the mathematical perspective refreshing. I have been teaching bioinformatics to CS students for several years and all too often the students are great at algorithms and theory but do not understand the user they are designing for. This book teaches just that -- how to use bioinformatics from a user or researcher's viewpoint. Medical students and biologists will find it useful for direct applicability to their work, but I also reccomend it for bioinformatics students who need to complement their theoretical background with practical use. All too often, CS students of bioinformatics can design a great database with powerful access tools, but with a horrible interface because they don't have this perspective.

Now, for the book itself. It is easy to read and covers all aspects of bioinformatics from a sequence perspective (information retrieval, BLAST, gene expression and microarrays, proteomics and protein bioinformatics, genomes and disease). The coverage of databases and URLs is thourough and the text is easy to read, yet useful. The book is comprehensive with one area seemingly missing -- it would have been useful to include a chapter on systems biology and/or cellular modeling and the tools available (i.e. E-Cell). The book is especially useful to a researcher who is trying to explore all aspects of a particular gene, protein, disease, or pathway using bioinformatics tools.

The book is in stark contrast to the other Pevser (that is Pevzner) who wrote a bioinformatics book that surveyed algorithm theory underlying bioinformatics.

This book is also useful for less technical professionals in industry -- the managers, lawyers and venture capitalists that pervade the biotech landscape all need to communicate effectively and they can surely learn that here, provided they have some background in cell biology first.

I spent a lot of time looking for a bioinformatics text book that focuses on sequence analysis for a course I'm teaching. I decided that Mount's book was too wordy and unclear, and while I liked Orengo's book quite a bit, it required a good amount of knowledge up-front to follow it. Pevsner's book is laid out in a logical fashion and is designed to teach the molecular biology types the underlying principles of bioinformatics. It discusses pairwise alignments, substitution matrices, multiple sequence alignments, profiles, position-specific scoring matrices and phylogenetic trees with a good amount of detail. There's also a chapter on microarray analysis, but to get into that deeply I recommend Draghici's book.
The 2nd half of the book discusses the genome organization and evolution of a variety of organisms (viruses, bacteria, eukaryotes, human), and was great for bringing me up to date on these topics.
I strongly recommend this as a textbook for undergraduate or graduate students learning bioinformatics.

This book is great and give me a lot of information in bioinformatics and genomic tools. Since I am new in bioinformatics and genomics, I need a basic understanding as well as update in these areas and this book gave those to me.
In addition, the language using in this book is not difficult to understand, especially for a beginner (and those ones whose not use English as their main language).
I think you should try to read this book!! :)

This is the third Bioinformatics text that I have read in the past three years. And, this particular text is light year *ahead* of the others. It is dense, but it gives the background and big-picture that many of the others are lacking.

The text does not always flow - as if different sentences from different sources were thrown together without transition. As the text does cite many papers, this is acceptable. However, a review and small edits to help with the flow would make the book better.

Regardless, it's the best text on this subject that I am currently aware of.

this is a wonderful book which gives you two subjects. it helps to become a bioinformatics expert and computational biologist.

"...an intriguing work targeted toward biologists wanting to solve problems...provides a compendium of many biological insights and breakthroughs and will be a useful resource...highly recommended." (Choice, Vol. 41, No. 7, March 2004)

A genious attempt to present bioinformatics as if it is a discipline without any computational content. Perfect for students who lost any hope to understand what is the engine driving bioinformatics tools but want simply to memorize how to use them instead. Must be a very comfortable reading for biologists but is as exciting as a long carefully designed restaurant menu for a mathematician. If the author wants to raise a new generation of biologists with this book then biology and *real* bioinformatics will be divorced forever.

I purchased this item new for a class I am in. I have only read a small amount as of yet, but it seems to be a well written text. The book came very quickly after my purchase.

The book as recieved from seller in exellent condition. Fundamental concepts of Bioinformatics are well explained.