It's ironic that a new field like bioinformatics rarely offers any way for newcomers to feel welcome. Bioinformatics is maturing, and this book is that welcome.

It's written as a textbook for a Bioinformatics 101 course, the kind that has both computing and biology students in it. Historically, the two have lived in uneasy truce. The biologists thought that a 'database' was an enzyme that acted on 'datab'. The programmers would, in the authors' words, "spontaneously abort" at the chemistry and informality of biology. Maybe that's less true now, but the authors offer just enough computing basics for the biologists and just enough biology for the computer crowd to be able to discuss the same thing.

After that intro, the authors cover many of the classic problems in bioinformatics, including assembly, motif-finding, clustering, HMMs, dynamic programming, and even mass spec analysis. The style is very readable, and discusses both the biology and the computation of every topic presented. Many algorithms are built up in steps, showing how successive insights from both computation and biology can make existing techniques work better. Along the way, they offer biographical notes about the founders and luminaries of modern biological computation.

This is a great first book for anyone wanting to enter the field, from either a biology or a computer science background. Advanced students will bottom out quickly, and may lose patience with the informal and gently-paced discussion. Sorry, this book was never meant for them. It's a beginner's book, one that respects the intelligence and capability of its reader. It's broad, basic, and detailed enough that modest programming skill will yield working code. This book has my highest recommendation.

//wiredweird

Wow...this book is great! It is responsible for why I am on this computer...my father bought it as a guide and got a good job with a good salary. They said it was amazing. Thanks, Pavel and Neil!