Rating: 
Summary: New to the field? This is your book!
Review: As a research scientist at a major pharmaceutical company, I became involved with microbial genomics four years ago. I have become familar with bioinformatics by talking and working with colleagues in my company, but on more than one occasion in the past, I found myself baffled by some detail or aspect of this new and rapidly evolving field. This book, Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills is an outstanding introduction for the biologist attempting to become broadly familar with the basics of the bioinformatics field. The authors begin with a highly informative introduction to the Unix operating system, and then proceed to describe many of the basic tools for sequence analysis, database searching, multiple sequence alignments and phylogenetic analysis. This section has an outstanding non-mathematical explanation of scoring matrices and dynamic programming for alignments. This is followed by chapters on protein structure and predicting protein structure and function from sequence. They also discuss tools for sequence assembly, annotating genomes, proteomics and biochemical pathway databases. There is an excellent chapter on analysis of large data sets using Perl scripts. The book closes with chapters on building relational databases and data visualization. The material is well written and clearly presented, and can serve as an excellent springboard to more advanced texts in the field. I highly recommend it to those who are beginning to use bioinformatics, as well as to those more experienced who would like a ready reference with the basics all under one cover. Well worth the modest price!!
Rating: 
Summary: AWFUL! SAVE YOUR MONEY
Review: AWFUL BOOK. HAS MANY MANY ERRORS. SAVE YOUR MONEY. NOT USEFUL.
THE WRITERS DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT.
Rating:
Summary: THE WRITERS SHOULD BE SHOT!
Review: Awful book. Not useful at all. FILLED WITH A TON OF INACCURACIES, ESPECIALLY IN THE GENETICS CENTRAL DOGMA AREA. Any comp scientist will learn genetics incorrectly from this.
What a waste of money and good paper that it was printed on
Rating: 
Summary: Useful but can be misleading
Review: Bioinformatics as we know it today is a conglomerate of quasi-scientific activity, software development and data management. Of course the field is still in making and the concepts of "scientific activity", "software development" and "data management" are neither well defined nor universally agreed upon by their practitioners. Gibas and Jambeck attempted to expose an impression about bioinformatics to the readers who want to be employed as bioinformaticians. I am not sure the authors' impression about the skills of bioinformaticians is universally correct. As a bioinformatics manager myself I like computer literate biologists collaborating with professional programmers. I would gladly train seasoned programmers according to Gibas and Jambeck book. However I think biologists would be better prepared for bioinformatics if they wrote some computer programs themselves. It does not matter that routine programs for computing in molecular biology already exist. If a self-learning student would write a primitive version of the program she is going to use, it would prepare her to understand what the program is capable of doing. I like the book as a potential text for good programmers who want to get a job in bioinformatics. However I think the book will mislead all readers who want to become computer-literate biologists. Unix and Perl are really not important in a long range (operating systems and scripting languages will evolve and change anyway.) Understanding principles of programming and computing does matter infinitely more for these readers even if they are unaware of this reality.
Rating:
Summary: Useful but can be misleading
Review: Bioinformatics as we know it today is a conglomerate of quasi-scientific activity, software development and data management. Of course the field is still in making and the concepts of "scientific activity", "software development" and "data management" are neither well defined nor universally agreed upon by their practitioners. Gibas and Jambeck attempted to expose an impression about bioinformatics to the readers who want to be employed as bioinformaticians. I am not sure the authors' impression about the skills of bioinformaticians is universally correct. As a bioinformatics manager myself I like computer literate biologists collaborating with professional programmers. I would gladly train seasoned programmers according to Gibas and Jambeck book. However I think biologists would be better prepared for bioinformatics if they wrote some computer programs themselves. It does not matter that routine programs for computing in molecular biology already exist. If a self-learning student would write a primitive version of the program she is going to use, it would prepare her to understand what the program is capable of doing. I like the book as a potential text for good programmers who want to get a job in bioinformatics. However I think the book will mislead all readers who want to become computer-literate biologists. Unix and Perl are really not important in a long range (operating systems and scripting languages will evolve and change anyway.) Understanding principles of programming and computing does matter infinitely more for these readers even if they are unaware of this reality.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful resource
Review: Biologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians will all find this book useful in linking their various fields together. No, it doesn't cover all the skills and resources necessary to do useful bioinformatics, and it's not intended to. Instead, it offers a sound and very readable introduction to the major aspects of the field and then tells the interested reader where to find out more about each aspect. If you are a student of bioinformatics and/or a working biologist or programmer who wants to move into bioinformatics, this book is essential.
Rating:
Summary: Totally acessible to Computer geeks looking into Biology.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: ok, but some glaring errors
Review: 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 ... ...
Rating:
Summary: A truly stellar piece of work!
Review: I was a complete newcomer to the field of bioinformatics before I read this book, and now I can't get enough; it's written with a genuinely remarkable passion, clarity and grace. Like virtuoso musicians, Ms Gibas and Mr Jambeck hit all the right notes and really make this material sing. Talk about laying down the law on Perl scripts! This book revolutionized my approach to computational biology, and I'd highly recommend it for anyone with any level of interest or experience (novices and grizzled veterans alike) in this exciting scientific frontier.
Rating:
Summary: Too much for the neophyte but not enough for next step
Review: I'd been looking forward to getting ahold of this book for awhile but am somewhat disappointed. To echo what some of the above have said, _Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills_ is at once too detailed for the absolute beginner yet insufficiently detailed for someone who wants to take the next steps. Beyond elaborating on the "necessary" skills, it might have been better to point readers to the wealth of existing books (many also published by O'Reilly). However, I strongly disagree with those who think Unix and Perl *are not* needed skills. If bioinformatics folk are to be more than data entry workers using black box programs, understanding the mechanics is a good thing. So Gibas and Jambeck are right in pointing out these topic. I am torn whether I think this is a must-have book for the lab library. I think Rashidi and Buehler's _Bioinformatics Basics_ is better as a compendium of existing resources and for giving a flavor of what one can do.
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