Customer Reviews

Bioinformatics: A Practical Guide to the Analysis of Genes and Proteins

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

 

 

"The novice user of bioinformatics tools needs a guide that answers several fundamental questions - what are these tools designed for and what can they do; what are their limitations; how does one access them, and where can one find further information. For each of the basic sub-fields of bioinformatics, Bioinformatics provides a survey, a list of world wide web addresses (URLs), and a list of monographs and reviews to which the reader may go for further information. Each chapter covers fundamental definitions and makes no assumptions about prior knowledge.... The book provides a broad overview of the basic tools for sequence analysis. It is a good starting point for the reader who wants to learn about the types of tools used in bioinfomatics and how to get started. For biologists approaching this subject for the first time, it will be a very useful handbook to keep on the shelf after the first reading, close to the computer." --Terry Gaasterland, The Rockefeller University

Baxevanis and Ouellete apparently convinced some of their colleagues from NIH (and a few others) to publish user manuals for selected computer programs in the form of edited book. The idea itself is valuable provided that the complete collection of meaningful software is described competently and honestly. Unfortunately the content of this book is limited mostly to the software developed by NCBI and to analyses performed on the UNIX-based workstations. There is almost no coverage of other bioinformatics software (except for the GCG package which contains software and database tools common with NCBI anyway.)

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the book is lack of description of the fundamentals of sequence analysis. With the exception of Chapter 10 one cannot learn sequence analysis from this volume. Nor would it be advisable to use it as a desk reference to find appropriate citations of published sequence analysis work. A vast majority of references cited is biased. Merits of the citations' content do not seem to matter to the editors and that makes their book almost useless for the would-be practitioners.

I hasten to admonish that the book appears to be primarily a software marketing material and not an effort to educate or otherwise empower the reader. I am surprised that the material covered by the book is not distributed free of charge via Internet or other publicly available means. 9 out of 16 contributors (I refer here to the first edition) are actively working for the US Government at the time of writing. Still their chapters appear to be copyrighted by the publisher instead of being in public domain. But these are all minor problems comparing to the misgivings of the book's content mentioned in the first two paragraphs of this note.

The purpose of the book appears to be to provide a broad overview of current public bioinformatics tools. If one is interested to find pointers to software that addresses a specific bioinformatics question, the book does a reasonable job of showing what was available at the end of 2000. However, this approach has two major shortcomings. First, the principles and main scientific ideas associated with each covered area are only glossed over. Second, there is a chronic lack of depth in the presentation of any particular method. Because of these two problems the book is useless to the novice and makes a poor choice as a textbook for an introductory bioinformatics course. The best chapter is #14 on phylogenetic analysis, which emphasizes the strategies of data analysis and potential misinterpretations of the results. An embarrassing addition to the second edition is a chapter on Perl, which I doubt will be useful to any type of reader. Another chapter, which would have been better left out is #1, an introduction to the internet. It may have been appropriate for the first edition, but the material is too simplistic for the present.

The book is a collection of chapters by different authors addressing software tools for various problems: database search, multiple sequence alignment, gene prediction, protein structure prediction, etc. A big flaw is that all of the authors assume a different level of prior background and have rather different emphases.

I'd have to agree with the other reviewer that Chapters 1 & 17, which constitute 10% of the book, are wasted paper. No one in 2001 (when the book was published), let alone 2004, needs Chapter 1's lengthy explanation of what e-mail and web browsers are. And the perl program at the anticlimax of Chapter 17 was ... anticlimactic.

The book is to a great extent a catalog of available software tools. With the exception of the chapters on multiple alignment and phylogeny, the emphasis is on not on how the tools work but how to operate them -- to the of saying "at this URL there is a web page where you can either paste in your sequence or upload a file". The idea of invoking a program through a Unix command line is more than once presented as a truly daunting prospect. The authors generally do a good job of emphasizing that the programs are the beginning of analysis and not the end; the results must always be viewed somewhat skeptically with an expert eye.

If you're coming at the book as a biologist, you will probably find it to be a useful catalog of software, though undoubtedly dated by now. If you're coming at it from the informatics side, you're going to need some background... a book like Dwyer's, Setubal and Meidanis's, or Mount's will get you up to speed on the algorithm aspects of the field with simplified versions of many of the big problems. Then you can look at this book to find good pointers to the ways the real-world versions have been addressed.

The book was published three years ago and, being to a large extent an index of the work of others, is necessarily no longer up to date in a fast-moving field. It needs a revision and, in the meantime, it would make more sense to snag a used copy than to pay full price for a new book.

I used the Baxevanis volume in coursework at Johns Hopkins Biotechnology program...several of the chapter authors are associated with the school. There's no doubt that the editor and authors are experts in their fields, but the volume seems somewhat dated, and is disjointed. I found a couple of the chapters virtually unreadable. The real killer is the price. The book is GROSSLY overpriced...

...

This book represents an very important contribution to the emerging field of bioinformatics. There is a vast, and continually growing, amount of resources available for the analysis of DNA and protein sequences. The difficulty comes is making in sense of all it all, and organizing it in the most productive manner possible. This work is one of the few texts -- and certainly the most current -- to address this issue and provide realistic and usable systems to accomplish that. It should be required reading for anyone wishing to remain up-to-date in this rapidly changing field. This is one "practical guide" that really is!

I own both the first and second editions of this book, and really think they're great. The second edition really is a brand-new book, seeing how far this field has come in a short period of time, with a lot of new material in the second edition, like on sequence assembly, comparative genomics, and BioPerl. Looking at the chapters that have been retained from the first edition, there has been extensive rewrites -- pretty impressive for a "new edition" that's now almost 100 pages thicker than the first edition was.

I also like how the second edition broadens out to resources available throughout the world, using a wider set of authors (meaning well beyond NCBI) than the first edition did. Baxevanis and Ouellette seem to have a very good sense not just for where the field is, but where the field is going, and who the major players are -- the inclusion of a chapter on whole-genome analysis (microarrays) is evidence of that, material that doesn't appear in any of the other available titles, to my knowledge.

I can see how an advanced reader interested in the mathematics underlying commonly-used bioinformatics technqiues would move to a title like Durbin et al., and these two books really are the "best in class" -- start with the Baxevanis title, and move onto the Durbin title from there. They're really the only two you'll need. I personally don't know anyone who's been disappointed by these two books.

Five stars, a great place for people like me (trained as a biochemist) to start in a field that I know is going to be more and more important as to how I do my work in the future. I've been able to use basic things like BLAST more effectively, and finally understand that there are other ways to look at sequence besides BLAST and how to apply those tools to my own sequences. I really like the Entrez chapter, since Entrez does so much more than I ever realized it could do! I haven't ventured into the advanced territory yet (like microarrays), but at least I understand what I'm hearing in seminars now and what all those red and green spots actually represent.

I read the review by "a reader in Cambridge, MA", and don't understand what their beef is with this title. The authors have tried (and have succeeded) in pointing the readers to the best PUBLIC DOMAIN software out there, augmenting documentation that's generally lacking. Have you ever tried finding good docs on the NCBI Web site? Well, these two editors got them for you. UNIX-centric? I can't speak for the first edition, but check out the second edition and see that there's tons of Netscape screen dumps demonstrating the tools and making things as easy as possible for the reader. I originally bought this because of the reviews published in Science and Cell and a slew of other journals, all favorable, so the "reader in Cambridge" seems out of step with all of the published journal reviews of the book. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I just wanted to point this out for a sense of balance here, especially since my own experience was so different.

Like any survey, it seems to touch the major features only. And, as others have pointed out, the tools change but the book doesn't.

I think this is a good, brief introduction to the wide variety of bioinformatic tools and databases on the internet. It describes the major features of each, and the kinds of results that each tool is good for. After that, the serious user will go to the sources of each tool or database, to learn more about the specifics as of the moment. No book can hope to keep up with the weekly enhancements at the major repositories.

I emphasize that this is for tools users, not tool makers. It addresses the working scientists who already know their subjects and their needs. This skips over the algorithms in favor of higher level descriptions, and skips over many of the biological reasons for the tools described. Better-informed tool users get better answers from the tools, true. At some point, though, the biologists want to skip the theory, skip the introduction to subjects in which they're experts, and get on with their science. I don't think this book was ever meant for people - and I'm one - who want full details of the algorithms.

I agree, the book treats its many subjects in a shallow way. I think that is by intent, since the book's real goal is breadth and its target is a reader who knows the basic science. It's a bit off the center of my interests, but I've found it helpful.

A great introduction to bioinformatics with links to biological databases and data mining tools. I have the edition that was written in 1998 so many of the links in the book are now inactive. The book contains good introductory summaries of the algorithms used in the data mining tools discussed. The book however is aimed more at the biologist with little computer knowledge. If you are a computer scientist, the book will be a little boring and I would recommend "Biological Sequence Analysis" by Durbin et al. The price of the book is steep for the amount of pages you are paying for. If price is a consideration in your purchase, I recommend the use of the tutorials on many of the bioinformatics websites such as NCBI, EBI, and Swiss-Prot which are just as good as the book.