Customer Reviews

Computational Biology -: Unix/Linux, Data Processing and Programming

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A straightforward little book. Essentially a unix text about sed, awk and Perl. Ostensibly, it has to do with computational biology and the parsing of the various common data formats in that field. But a perusal of the book shows that the scope is more general. The biology formats are used as case studies. If you are in high energy physics, for example, and you have accelerator data in some other format, the book might still be of use in helping you parse out what you need.

The sed and awk discussions could have be written 10 years or more ago. Those programs have been very stable. Whereas Perl has undergone relatively rapid changes. In fact, as the book indicates, Perl is far more powerful than sed or awk. It is a fully fledged programming language that can take you some time to master. The book doesn't give a comprehensive coverage of Perl's abilities. But for the expected reader, it may suffice.

This is just another basic book on how to use Linux, that's all. It comes with a fancy title "Computational Biology" but it has nothing to do with that subject.

I have to confess I bought this book in a rush, without reading the descriptions and reviews. Although I was a bit disappointed (I'm not a newbie on that subject anymore), this does not mean it's useless - I'm sure it will be of great use to people who are totally unfamiliar with Linux systems and programming. I would probably use it to teach this subject for undergraduates.