Rating: 
Summary: Misleading,Superficial and just plain wrong in places
Review: This book does NOT live up to the usual O'Reilly Standards fro excellence.The book did little actually convey what working in bioinformatics is about and frankly got a number of things quite wrong. (p.144) NCBI did not invent ASN.1. They just very BADLY implemented a particular semantic variant of it. No one who knows anything about ASN.1 would call it a relational database format. (p.150) the GenBank Flat File format is hardly a 'legacy' format. It and the sister EMBL format are still the formats of choice for serious bioinformatics work involving sequences. (pp. 47-130) O'Reilly already has a fine series of books on using UNIX. That did not need to be recapitulated here. No mention of anything serious like dbSNP,TSC,HGBase etc... Not worth the money.
Rating: 
Summary: Good introduction, somewhat uneven
Review: This book is a good introduction to Bioinformatics and to what it takes to get started in the field. Some reviewers deride it as too superficial or as too Unix-centric, but I think those are two of its strengths. The authors lay no claim to having written the definitive work on the subject of Bioinformatics, and they freely admit that they come in with a certain bias. If you are serious about Bioinformatics this won't be your last book anyway, but it'll get you started. That said, I found the material a bit uneven. The authors tend to jump from almost trivial stuff to very complex in a heartbeat, and they sometimes use a concept or command before it can be properly understood One example: Introducing the Unix commands head and tail, then moving on to split and csplit. The introduction to regular expressions as needed by csplit follows a few pages later. Nevertheless, I plan to use this book as a companion text to my own sequence of computer classes for biologists, and I think it will serve that purpose very well.
Rating: 
Summary: HIGHLY recommended for those entering bioinformatics
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: horrible
Review: This book is the worst I've ever purchased. It has been no help whatsoever. It had a couple examples of PERL programming...big deal. The 5-star ratings are obvious shills (one reviewer wrote a very long review and has never reviewed anything else)
Rating: 
Summary: Good entry portal, but Unix not required
Review: This is a good place to start for the computer person who wants to get into Bioinformatics. There are overviews of the many biological issues involved, and URLs aplenty to get more information and download software. However, the emphasis on Unix as the platform of choice is becoming less and less relevant. Very few bioinformatics programs are available only on Unix, and many are available only on Windows and not Unix. Researchers who already know Windows and/or have access to departmental support for their Windows systems are ill-advised to get into the morass of setting up and supporting a Linux or other Unix machine.
Rating:
Summary: Quite good introduction
Review: This is a quite good book for people who have little background in Bioinformatics or Computer Science. I have to say it was pretty good in introducing basic ideas in Bioinformatics, and online resources. However, I think the authors can do a better job in providing more details in certain areas, for example, in Perl programming, and in sequence alignment. Some parts of the book is so simple that the contents in those parts are not quite useful. I would recommend this book to people who are new to Bioinformatics. But not to people who have taken one or two
introductory classes.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent BooK
Review: This is an excellent book. The authors know their audience. I work at a biotech company in Silicon Valley and use this book everyday. It is written in plain English and covers all the skills needed for the bioinformatics environment that I work in. Section II covers the Bioinformatics workstation as well as the tools needed to have a functional system up and running. Bioinformatics Computer Skills is the best and only book on this subject. Whenever a new field in science emerges there needs to be one book that puts it all together for people to get an understanding of what that field is all about, what you need to know to be good in that field (pg 14), what tools you need, what matters and this book does that. This book is not a bible of bioinformatics, but a blueprint of how such systems work and what skills are need as well as where one should seek out further knowledge. O'reilly press, Cynthia Gibas and Per Jambeck have done an excellent job with this first book and I hope there will be other books to follow. They have begun to define this new field. The other reviews (on this web site) that criticize this book do not understand the purpose of the book. It is to shed light on a field that is new and undefined. People who may not have known what bioinformatics is, or what skills one needs to have in order to enter this new field, now have a refrence point. The problem with many scientist today is they really believe they are more important then the people they are trying to save with their great discoveries. Everything having to do with science does not have to be written in the same context of the Journal Of Science etc... Regular people have a right to understand what is being written and how it will affect them in the future. The attacks of ("too superficial, misleading" etc..) are unfair. Those critics should write their own book so that the rest of us can be more informed. This is a great book on the subject.
Rating:
Summary: Too trivial to be useful
Review: This is one more book written by new and enthusiastic bioinformaticians and published by a prominent publisher of computer books. The content is trivial and superficial at best. Moreover it is potentially confusing and misleading for newcomers. The authors play with names of computer programs and databases but cannot even correctly identify the reasons why those programs have been written in the first place. I believe the focus on Unix and perl is misguided as well. It does not serve any educational purpose except for demonstrating that the authors know about Unix and perl (which they certainly do.) There exist fuller and better treatments of these topics and there are fuller and better introductory texts of bioinformatics. The only good think I have noticed about the book is its low price. But the book is not worth buying even though. A bioinformatics newcomer will be better off buying Durbin and co-authors "Biological Sequence Analysis" and reading search results for keywords *bioinformatics*, *computational biology*, and *genomics* on the Internet.
Rating:
Summary: Very useful for the working bioinformatist
Review: This is really a niche book, but its niche is an important one. Bioinformatics as a field stretches from those who only use web or local resources for analysis to those who write the algorithms for programs like Blast. This book is for those in between... the people use more sophisticated tools and sometimes tweak an established algorithm. The focus is on learning enough UNIX to use tools that require it, and an introduction to Perl. Strengths are in the areas of structural biology and to a lesser extent, genomics. You will still need other books on programming and molecular biology. In my own work this book has helped both in describing useful programs that I didn't know existed, and in walking me through the steps to compiling them after I had source code. Biologists just learning UNIX, Perl and moving beyond the web to advanced tools will find 'Developing Bioinformatics Skills' useful.
Rating:
Summary: Useful only for a reference book
Review: We are all well aware that it is impossible to write a book on bioinformatics satisfying all types of readers. That is the reason why we are spending much time on finding a book that we can say "This book is just for me!" Well, this book is not a self-teaching book by itself. Don't expect that things will become clear to understand after reading this book. If your expectation is just to taste flavor of bioinformatics and to use it as a reference book, then this book is right for you.
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