Customer Reviews

Essential Bioinformatics

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

 

 

This compact, economical book (at least for bioinformatics) covers the usual basics of bioinformatics (Databases, alignments, phylogeny, gene prediction, structure prediction, transcriptome analysis, proteome analysis) but is unique in its approach. Recognizing most life scientists need to understand basic bioinformatis, but lack extensive mathematical modeling, computer command line or programming experience Jin Xiong has written a text that describes common bioinformatics tools to perform each of the above studies. Using diagrams and figures in lieu of complex mathematical formulas, Xiong explains how the tools work. Each task in bioinformatics has many comoputing tools - the strengths and weaknesses of each, and guidance in critical evaluation of the output are explained. There are capstone problems at the end of the book that are extremely helpful in enhancing understanding of the tools. The text is easy to read.

In the preface. Xiong describes that the book is a compilation of notes from several years of teaching bioinformatics. Therefore they presumably have been revised based on student review. However, this is a first edition - there are a lot of typos, misspellings, and some figures have errors. Hopefully these will be fixed for this is a fine introductory book.

The text is for those new to bioinformatics. Unlike many bioinformatics books, there is no coverage of programming (PERL or SQL for ex,). Therefore, those who are already skilled in this area will likely not find this particularly useful. Familiarity with the UNIX operating system will help readers do the problems.

The author gives a pretty good summary of this book in the preface: 'I needed a text that was comprehensive enough to cover all major aspects in the field [bioinformatics], technical enough for a college level course, and sufficiently up to date to include most current algorithms while at the same time being logical and easy to understand... The book is aimed at graduate and undergraduate students in biology, or any practicing molecular biologise, who has no background in computer algorithms but wishes to understand the fundamental principles of bioinformatics and use this knowledge to tackle his or her own research problems.'

The book was developed over several years, first being issued in the form of Xerox'd lecture notes to test the acceptability by students. Subsequently the notes were revised, expanded and now assembled into book form.

There are now a large number of standard software packages designed for use in the bioinformatics area. Many of these are discussed. However, it is not intended for this book to be a manual on these packages. Instead it discusses the software from a standpoint of when and where specific packages can be used to solve your problem of the moment.

As a field, bioinformatics is expanding and developing at an extremely rapid rate. This book is up to date as of early 2006.

The book is written in an easy and concise way. It is a very useful book for beginners. If the reader knows the basics, he needs a more advanced book.

the book is very good. The shipping was very fast that I was able to complete my homework on time. If I were you I would rather buy this book through amazon than through the bookstore where it is much much more expensive!

I used this book for a bioinformatics class and I also worked as a biotechnology programmer for around 8 years. It is a simple well written introduction to some topics in bioinformatics. But it not high level enough to use a reference for my work; but a introduction is probably what the author intended.