Customer Reviews

New Biology for Engineers and Computer Scientists

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This book gives a very good overview of cell and molecular biology. The information provided is not complete but enough to get a solid knowledge about biological processes. That means you do not have to read hundreds of papes to come to the point you are interested in. Moreover, it provides you a good knowledge about different types of proteins and their role in biological processes. This is important because somehow they are all connected with each other in a complex way.
The only negative point is, that it is poorly written. I guess this is more the fault of the publisher then of the authors because they accepted it as it is. A new edition would certainly profit by a thorough review. Nevertheless, a very good book one can strongly recommend to non-biologists.

The book has a lot of information on molecular biology accessible to anyone with an electrical engineering or computer science background, very much what the title advertises. (I just don't quite get the "new" qualifier for "biology" in the title). A big positive of the book are the assignments at the end of each chapter. They are built to make you go out after more and explore further resources available on the subject (mainly web based), and these are very nice indeed if you are using the book for self-study. Another big positive is that the authors make lots of referencing to using the web-based KEGG database, and that is very helpful and neatly done. Negatives are: the text sometimes is a bit confusing and difficult to understand, presenting too much information all at once and treating everything too superficially. The authors presented some topics very clearly for an engineer, but as for others you have to have some 'good' grasp of chemistry and molecular biology to understand. Also, there are lots of typos that make you feel like the editors wanted a book with a very nice presentation (the book looks very nice) but didn't care much about proof-reading. Figures are also confusing at times and are "recycled" here and there. Nonetheless, you can usually figure out what is wrong and what the authors wanted to say. In brief, it is a book with a nice presentation, lots of information, many references, nice assignments and one can learn from it, but it gives you the feel that they could have worked a bit more on content.