Customer Reviews

Principles of Biomedical Informatics

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This is an *excellent* book. I read it enthusiastically and I'm glad that it was available for me to do so. I think it fills a unique niche in the informatics book market in two ways:
- it is a book with significant attention to clinical informatics that has a strong computer science angle.
- it is an informatics "monograph"

While informatics is often described as the intersection between something like computer science, life science/medicine and library science books rarely position themselves squarely at this intersection. I have found that it is easier to find bioinformatics books that have a strong computer science angle than it is to find clinical informatics books with a strong CS/implementation angle. This book is the exception to that rule. It has an unabashedly serious approach to the computing inherent in clinical informatics (one should take author's choice of Lisp as telling) and a clinical focus. The treatment of library science topics, while less rigorous, is present and credible.

Unlike the standard textbooks in the area (ex: Shortliffe) it is not an edited volume; rather, it hangs together page after page as a single work by a single author. Because it has the hand of an individual it a much more pleasant book to read from cover-to-cover.

The physical book is very appealing. The pager is glossy and thick, the binding is substantial, the dimensions are pleasant, the figures are clear, and the typesetting (as with all LaTeX books) beautiful. Unfortunately unlike most LaTeX books it is hard to read. While the pages look wonderful I found that function was sacrificed in the process. The vertical spacing is cramped, the margins are small, and the lines are long. This makes the going slow and difficult which detracts from an otherwise excellent book. If it was 50 pages longer with a bit more generous white space the book would be a complete home run.

In short, I have nothing but positive things to say about the content of this book and mixed emotions about the physical book. I would suggest that the ideal reader has some background in informatics. For total novices the larger edited volumes are a better starting point. Additionally, while a reasonable introduction to Lisp is provided some background knowledge of the language is helpful.

If you care about informatics, have a soft spot for Lisp and want to really hold the field in your hands this is a book that cannot be overlooked.

I have been teaching informatics for many years and found myself having to create lectures to provide deeper thinking skills about the contents of the field, without an organized text to support those topics. Every topic that informatics students should know is discussed in this text, examined from a deep perspective, and even accompanied by programming code that implements the idea. The programming language is Lisp. This is a language that is not used in most medical informatics production environments (like EHR vendors), but in fact represents the thought underlying most informatics applications. Read the book to be smarter. If you're a boundary-spanning informatician, you'll figure out how to communicate with folks who don't think the Lisp way.