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.
Rating: 
Summary: Too general to actually learn anything
Review: While I agree that this book is very pleasant to read I really miss substantial information. The authors try to cover a large number of tools and techniques and even the UNIX operating system and Perl in one volume. Unfortunately everything stays very much on the surface. There are plenty of excellent introductory books on UNIX - why not refer to those and talk about algorithms instead? This leads us to the main weakness of the book (in my opinion): Lots of things are touched but none of them are really explained or illustrated by actual code or algorithms. Of cause a book on applying bioinformatics tools in every day lab-life would also be very usefull. But most tools are presented on extremly limited space so all the reader gets is a rough idea what the tool is for. Many popular and/or important packages are not described or even mentioned at all: e.g. there is just a tiny reference to GCG and EMBOSS is non-existant in the book. If you are in biology and would like to hear about some of the tools available on the net for free this book is for you: The book will get you curious about many things and give you some keywords to feed the search engine with along with a bunch of URLs. If you want to learn about computational biology and its foundations and methods you will be disappointed.
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