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Title: Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics by James Tisdall ISBN: 0-596-00080-4 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 15 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.57 (14 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Decent intro to the subject
Comment: As the banner above the title of James Tisdall's Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics indicates, this book is 'an introduction to Perl for biologists.' What the banner doesn't mention is that it's also an introduction to biology and bioinformatics for Perl programmers, and it's also an introduction to both Perl *and* biology for people that have never really been exposed to either field. The author has clearly thought a lot about making one book to please these different audiences, and he has pulled it off nicely, in a way that manages to explain basic topics to people learning about each field for the first time while not coming off as condescending or slow-paced to those that might already have some exposure to it.
Superficially, this book isn't all that different from a lot of introductory Perl books: the Perl material starts out with an overview of the language, followed by a crash course on installing Perl, writing programs, and running them. From there, it goes on to introduce all the various language constructs, from variables to statements to subroutines, that any programmer is going to have to get comfortable with. Pretty run of the mill so far. Tisdall starts with two interesting assumptions, though: [1] that the reader may have never written a computer program before, and so needs to learn how to engineer a robust application that will do its job efficiently and well, and [2] that the reader wants to know how to write programs that can solve a series of biological problems, specifically in genetics and proteomics.
As such, there is at least as much material about the problems that a biologist faces and the places she can go to get the data she needs as there is about the issues that a Perl programmer needs to be aware of. The author introduces the reader to the basics of DNA chemistry, the cellular processes that convert DNA to RNA and then proteins, and a little bit about how and why this is important to the biologist and what sorts of information would help a biologist's research. The main sources of public genetic data are noted, and the often confusing -- and huge -- datafiles that can be obtained from these sources are examined in detail.
With the code he presents for solving these problems, Tisdall makes a point of not falling into the indecipherable-Perl trap: this is a useful language, well-suited to the essentially text-analysis problems that bioinformatics means, and he doesn't want to encourage the kind of dense, obscure, idiomatic coding style that has given Perl an undeservedly bad reputation. Some of Perl's more esoteric constructs are useful, and they show up when they're needed, but they're left out when they would only serve to confuse the reader. This is a good decision.
Rather, the focus is on teaching readers how to solve biological problems with a carefully developed library of code that happens to leverage some of Perl's most useful properties. The result is pretty much a biologist's edition of Christiansen & Torkington's Perl Cookbook or Dave Cross' Data Munging With Perl. The author presents a series of issues that a working bioinformaticist might have to deal with daily -- parsing over BLAST, GenBank, and PDB files, finding relevant motifs in that parsed data, and preparing reports about all of it. If a bioinformaticist's job is to be able to report on interesting patterns from these various sources, then following the programming techniques that Tisdall explains in clear, easy-to-follow prose would be an excellent way to go about doing it.
And when I say "programming techniques," note that I'm not specifically mentioning Perl. The code in this book is clear and organized, and all programs are carefully decomposed into logical subroutines that are then packaged up into a library file that each later sample program gets to draw from. Each new program typically contains a main section of a dozen lines of code or less, followed by no more than two or three new subroutines, along with calls to routines written earlier and called from the BeginPerlBioinfo.pm that is built up as the book progresses. Each sample is typically preceded by a description of what it's trying to accomplish and followed by a detaild description of how it was done, as well as suggestions of other ways that might have worked or not worked.
This modular approach is fantastic -- too many Perl books seem to focus so heavily on the mechanics of getting short scripts to work that they lose sight of how to build up a suite of useful methods and, from those methods, to develop ever-more-sophisticated applications. It isn't quite object-oriented programming, but that's clearly where Tisdall is headed with these samples, and given a few more chapters he probably would have started formally wrapping some of this code into OO packages.
If I have a complaint with the book, in fact, it's that Tisdall doesn't go any further: everything is good, but it ends too soon. Seemingly important topics such as OO programming, XML, graphics (charts & GUIs), CGI, and DBI are mentioned only in passing, under "further topics" in the last chapter. I also have a feeling that some of the biology was shorted, and the book barely touches upon the statistical analysis that probably is a critical aspect of the advanced bioinformaticist's toolbox. I can understand wanting to keep the length of a beginner's book relatively short, and this was probably the right decision, but it would have been nice to see some of the earlier sample problems revisited in these new contexts by, for example, formally making an OO library, showing a sample program that provided a web interface to some of the methods already written, or presenting code that presented results as XML or exchanged them with a database.
But these are minor quibbles, and if the reader is comfortable with the material up to this point, she shouldn't have a hard time figuring out how to go a step further and do these things alone. It's a solid book, and one that should be able to get people learning Perl, genetics, or both up to speed and working on real world problems quickly.
Rating: 3
Summary: Yes, it is beginning perl for bioinformatics beginners!
Comment: If don't know what is PERL, go ahead and start with this book! He gives some brief introduction into perl and teaches you how to start writing code on day 1. The book is good in that sense there
are simple excercises at the end of each chapter! If you are already a bioinformatician or a programmer don't spend a dime on buying it! Major drawbacks are : Ignores details on Obj-O or module based programming.......! He calls accessing/reformatting some of the Blast output, pdb files, FASTA files as Bioinformatics......! That is some what disappointing. Pattern match 101 has been demonstrated using some simple examples...... certainly a delight to beginners of both Bioinformatics and PERL..... and a disappointment for people who already know something in both the field!
E&OE!
Rating: 5
Summary: Great introduction
Comment: This is the first book that I read about Perl and also the first one that I read about Bioinformatics. I think it has an enough level of details so that readers who have little or no Bioinformatics background can easily understand the basics, and readers who wants to focus more on Perl usage in Bioinformatics can also get quick and useful examples such as interpreting BLAST output, and regular expressions.
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Title: Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills by Cynthia Gibas, Per Jambeck ISBN: 1565926641 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 15 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics by James D. Tisdall ISBN: 0596003072 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Bioinformatics for Dummies by Jean-Michel Claverie, Cedric Notredame ISBN: 0764516965 Publisher: For Dummies Pub. Date: 15 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
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Title: Bioinformatics: Sequence and Genome Analysis by David W. Mount ISBN: 0879696087 Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Pub. Date: 15 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $75.00 |
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Title: BLAST by Ian Korf, Mark Yandell, Joseph Bedell ISBN: 0596002998 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 01 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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