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1. HIGHLY recommended for those entering bioinformatics
   This book is an excellent introduction to bioinformatics for a person entering the field or deciding to enter. The author’s introduction to UNIX in the second part of the book is better written than most books devoted completely to UNIX. The discussion would be even better if some words were said about the new MAC OS X operating system. With its UNIX flavor, and the ease of use of a MAC, it will no doubt make its presence known in bioinformatics. Publication timing may have prevented a discussion of it however since OS X has just been released in the last few months. A non-mathematical but very informative overview of sequence analysis is given in part three of the book. A mathematician who might be deciding to enter this exciting field will the discussion good preparation for further technical reading in computational biology and sequence algorithms. The authors even include a discussion of mathematical physiology and give URLs and a list of companies attempting to create user applications in this area of computational biology. This is a further example of the book’s merits, as it shows what areas in bioinformatics need more application tools to be developed. Even the rather short chapter on PERL programming still suffices to create an appreciation of the power of PERL in bioinformatics. What takes sometimes many weeks of development time and many lines of code can frequently be done in a matter of hours and a few lines of code in PERL. The book ends with an introduction to databases and data mining, and, even though the discussion is short, the authors explain the concepts well. Data mining in this field, as in others, is a subject that will take on further importance in the near future. In addition, the book is just plain fun to read. A large set of references is given along with many URLs throughout the book. I visited all of these Websites and with their content and the book at hand….I had a BLAST.

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2. Rating depends on what you purpose is
   My purpose in ordering this book is to see if I can make the transision into this new field. From that perspective, I would rank this book 5 stars. It really satisfied my need to understand what is required to make the leap into this area.This book is a real broad swatch of all the different skills that one needs to know to assume a basic competency in bioinformatics. On page 14, they actually list core essential skills and “nice to have skills”. molecular biology, Unix, Perl, algorithms, major biology software packages are all on the essential core list. The auuthors really take the viewpoint on here is how to set your computer up (on a budget!), web sites to go to and so on. Not knowing Unix and not having it currently on my computer made the two Unix/Linux chapters academic.The book is great from the perspective of seeing the big picture. Where it falls down is in the depth department. “Predicting Protein Structure and Function from Sequence” is covered in 35 pages! It is impossible to understand this subject in 35 pages – yet the authors conveyed a sense of the subject and how it fits into a larger picture.If you are familiar with the subject and want in depth treatment, this is not the book.if you want an introduction “big picture” book this could serve your needs.

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3. Totally acessible to Computer geeks looking into Biology.
   I have been examining my career and looking around to see what else interests me. I am a unix and perl hacker. I never took a whole lot of math or bio in college, and worried that a text like this would be as difficult to understand as _Biological Sequence Analysis_ (which I purchased at the same time) was. To put it more clearly, in order to begin understanding _Biological Sequence Analysis_, I am going to have to study Statistics and Discrete Mathematics. Coming from a programming background, I already understand matrix-based math, and I understand string algorithms and algorithms in general.This book allowed me to take a look at what Bioinformatics is all about, and see if I am interested.I can also say, as a perl programmer and general unix guy, that the unix and perl taught in this book are quite good, and concise while still being comprehensive.This is definitely one of the better OReilly books I have read lately.

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4. ok, but some glaring errors
   I too was eagerly looking forward to this book , and by the time I finished it, I asked myself , “Isn’t there more?”. I would say this book tries to be too many things for too many people. If you are a biologist and have little/no experience with programming, especially in a Unix/Linux environment this would offer a fairly concise but maybe too brief intro to bioinformatics. THere are some nice chapters on how to setup a Linux system and learning some basic commands , but there are other O’reilly books to help with that (Learning the unix operating system comes to mind). On the other hand, for a computer programmer/IT person, if you were sharp and could stand to wade through some of the references the author suggests for learning more about molecular biology, you could probably apply what you learn in this book pretty well. Perhaps they should have named this Intro to Bioinformatics skills. However, there are some glaring errors in the book, most notably in the intro chapters to molecular biology, esp. the diagrams for how DNA is converted into RNA and is in turn translated into a polypeptide. I hope the authors have corrected this by the next printing. … … … There is a vast and thriving unix community developing tools that are as good or better than any Windows based tools out there, plus they’re free ! Most of the bioinformatics firms I know of use Linux/Unix , so that … …

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5. Find a newer book
   Seriously out of date.

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6. Very simplistic book.
   The book is at a level of a magazine article overview, just longer. With some editing it probably could have made it into a magazine.

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7. Good

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8. Es un libro indispensable para empezar en la bioinformática. Explicaciones muy claras, lenguaje ameno y directo. Sin duda un indispensable.

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9. 絵が少ない、紹介している内容がやや古いなどの欠点はあるものの、普段使っているツールやその原型が、どのような理屈のもとに解析を行なっているのかについて、比較的平易に説明されている。UNIXベースの解析について述べられているが、そこを読み飛ばしても読む価値はある一冊だと思う。

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10. Und selbst fuer die ist es didaktisch schlecht organisiert. Ich habe den Kauf dieses Buchs selbst ~ 2000 sehr schnell bereut – heutzutage ist es sicher noch dazu veraltet.

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11. 　　分子生物学の実験をしているけどコンピューターにはあまり興味が無い、という人にはよいマニュアルになるであろう。　　あくまで実践的でリナックスのインストールの仕方や簡単なコマンドまで載っている。他に、役立つウェブサイトや、ソフトの使い方、特徴などの説明が多い。読み物としてはまったくつまらないもので、コンピューターの前で格闘しながらマニュアル的に使うのがよいであろう。ncbiのホームページの使い方など、正直分子生物学の実験をしている人には常識となっているようなことが多い。だが、背景となっている理論抜きに実際に使うときの注意点を述べるなど、数学やコンピューターが嫌いな生物学者には適切なアドバイスが期待できる。

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