Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics

by James Tisdall, Lorrie LeJeune (Editor)

With its highly developed capacity to detect patterns in data, Perl has become one of the most popular languages for biological data analysis. But if you're a biologist with little or no programming experience, starting out in Perl can be a challenge. Many biologists have a difficult time learning how to apply the language to bioinformatics. The most popular Perl programming books are often too theoretical and too focused on computer science for a non-programming biologist who needs to solve very specific problems. Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics is designed to get you quickly over the Perl language barrier by approaching programming as an important new laboratory skill, revealing Perl programs and techniques that are immediately useful in the lab. Each chapter focuses on solving a particular bioinformatics problem or class of problems, starting with the simplest and increasing in complexity as the book progresses. Each chapter includes programming exercises and teaches bioinformatics by showing and modifying programs that deal with various kinds of practical biological problems. By the end of the book you'll have a solid understanding of Perl basics, a collection of programs for such tasks as parsing BLAST and GenBank, and the skills to take on more advanced bioinformatics programming. Some of the later chapters focus in greater detail on specific bioinformatics topics. This book is suitable for use as a classroom textbook, for self-study, and as a reference. The book

Genres: Reference, Science, Technology, Programming, Biology, Nonfiction

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Bettina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only skimmed through it. But it did explain things in a clear manner and explains also terminology quite well.

[Andy McKenzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good, though probably a bit dated now. Still, the basics of how to generate a random sequence of DNA and how to search text files helped me with my intuition for more complex endeavors, like motif searching. I found it a great way to not only learn Perl but also as one of my first introductions to programming languages.

[Mayuri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear and useful.

[Dave Peticolas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice little book for biologists wanting to learn Perl. It has some useful information for programmers wanting to learn computational biology, but only a light primer.