Customer Reviews

Exploring Bioinformatics: A Project-Based Approach

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This book is completely not worth the price in any way shape or form. I had to use this book for a semester and this book caused the most pain I have ever had in any class. Let's start with the print quality. You would think that a book with this price would have the best print quality, you would be wrong. Try black and green, no color images at all. This wouldn't be such an issue if there weren't parts of the book that refer to charts with colors like yellow, red, and blue. This means that the text of the book tells you to look at charts in parts of the book you simply can't see. This book screams cheap in design and the rest of the book supports the impression.

It gets worst, the content of the chapters is simply terrible. Lets start at the beginning, the book claims that it is suitable for beginners it is not. The first chapter starts with a simple hello word program in perl, simple enough. That is the extent of basic perl that you are taught. Seriously the gulf in perl knowledge needed from chapter one to two is massive. You are taught nothing about perl before you are expected to use quite a lot perl. I am talking about a class of twenty which was completely lost in the transition from chapter one to two. For a book to be so badly designed for that many people to get lost, it says something. The book has more lapses in logical progression.

One of the book features is an on your section at the end of each chapter which is supposed to practice your skills that you learned in the chapter. It is completely useless. The end of chapter section actually requires knowledge that isn't taught until latter in the book to solve. For example, one of the hints to solve the problem was recursion, which is a fairly advanced technique, it wasn't taught until several chapters later in the book, but was needed at that point in the book. Even better the explanation on how to do it was beyond substandard, and it lacked a useful code example, which made learning how to do recursion in this book impossible. In general a lot of the code examples are lacking. One of the things that my instructor told me was to comment on every line of my code, otherwise it would be difficult for another person to follow. The book doesn't do this. A lot of the code in the book lack any type of meaningful comments making understand the examples very difficult, not very conductive to learning.

In all this book is not worth the money and is not suitable for any type of instruction.