Rating: 
Summary: Excellent introduction for biologists
Review: David Mount did an excellent job introducing bioinformatics to biologists. Without a lot of Mathematics he explains the algorithms used for sequence alignments or phylogenetics, much better than any other book I have seen. Particularly, I found the chapter about Phylogenetic Prediction very helpful, that shows advantages and disadvantages of the numerous phylogenetic analysis programs with a lot of examples and helps the molecular biologist to decide which one to use. Although this book is quiet expensive, I think it is worth every penny!
Rating: 
Summary: Agonizingly painful
Review: David W. Mount is a terrible writer. I can't believe how much of a chore this book is to read. His sentences, in my opinion, are ambiguous and I find myself backtracking unnecessarily.
Rating: 
Summary: whatever
Review: Decent qualitative overview. Some discussions of algorithms are so superficial that they are misleading. Slick presentation. Used at Stanford's intro to methods course - a good recommendation.So far, the best there is for a survey course - but for depth and accuracy in sequence analysis algorithms, go to Durbin et al or Gussfield.
Rating:
Summary: A great book for the steep ramp-up in bioinformatics
Review: Dr. Mount provides an excellent text/guide for those who are interested in making the steep climb into the field of bioinformatics. As a bioinformatics graduate student with an undergraduate degree in biology, I often find that I am over my head in the mathematical jargon that is used in bioinformatics literature. Mount's book gave me the step-up I needed in order to digest the more technically cutting edge alogrithms in the field. He covers all the major areas of bioinformatics (from a biologist's point of view) with the exception of microarray data analysis (which I believe was just coming out at the time the book was printed). I cannot recommend this text more to anyone who is coming into the field. It is especially useful for senior undergraduates or early graduate students. And don't let the price-tag scare you off... CSHL Press books are always expensive, but they are usually worth every nickle.
Rating: 
Summary: Rushed, Needs a good editor
Review: I am an undergraduate Biotechnology student who is using this book for an intro Bioinformatics class at the Junior/Senior level. It describes the field from a biologists perspective, and doesn't include too much math. It describes the steps that an algorithm within the program would use, and the logic behind them, without going into the complexities of the coding. While this is a book by and for Biologists, I have found the book to be very rough and in need of extensive editing. On the first test the professor was disappointed as only 1-2 people made it into the A range. At the time I wondered if it was related to the difficulty of the text. To my surprise, my professor began to give us 10 to 20 page handouts per class, covering the material in his lectures. Although he never directly stated this, the handouts were apparently there to make up for the weakness of the text. It definitely has potential to be a good text for biologists. If the author and editor put in significant work, this could really become a very good book. However I really can't recommend the current edition.
Rating:
Summary: good for computational biologist
Review: If you are a biologist and just want to know some background information of how to apply bioinformatics to your research, do not read this book. My recommendation for you is "developing bioinformatics computer skills" and some other books like that.
If you are a student or scientist who study bioinformatics, this book is an excellent book and really worthy to read. This books gives very detailed information on algorithm to help us understand how the software such as BLAST and FASTA are designed. The illustrations are easy to understand compared with other books I have read, especially for the statistics part of any algorithm.
One weak point is that the book focus on nucleic acid sequence analysis while talk little about protein.
Rating:
Summary: good for computational biologist
Review: If you are a biologist and just want to know some background information of how to apply bioinformatics to your research, do not read this book. My recommendation for you is "developing bioinformatics computer skills" and some other books like that.
If you are a student or scientist who study bioinformatics, this book is an excellent book and really worthy to read. This books gives very detailed information on algorithm to help us understand how the software such as BLAST and FASTA are designed. The illustrations are easy to understand compared with other books I have read, especially for the statistics part of any algorithm.
One weak point is that the book focus on nucleic acid sequence analysis while talk little about protein.
Rating:
Summary: Horrible. A lot better books should be available nowadays
Review: In short, the author does not have enough writing skill to write this text book. I purchased this book a while ago. At that time, the book was really difficult to read. I thought that it is because I do not have enough knowledge to understand the material. So I stopped reading this book and studied bioinformatics by other means. After gaining enough knowledge in bioinformatics, I re-opened this book, and it is funny to find that I still have the same amount of difficulty in understanding what the author wrote about topics that I have already built good understanding. Reading this book will only deteriorate one's understanding. Several years ago, only just a few books were available on the market, so one needed to purchase this book. These days, there are lots of varieties to choose, and any choice is likely to be better than this book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: The book covers a fairly broad range of topics but still manages to teach you something. It is not one of those books that just list a number of nice web sites to visit. You'll get an understandable explanation e.g. of how sequence alignment really works - or phylogenetic trees and so forth. After reading the book you will have actually understood the underlying concepts and algorithms so you could sit down at your computer and start writing little programms. At the same time the math in the book is not overwhelming to biologists who are probably the main audience of this text. For the seasoned programmer there is enough biological applications in the book to get some ideas what to play with.
Do I have any complaints? The price is a bit over the top!
Rating:
Summary: Good First Draft
Review: The book has a great table of contents, but it reads more like
a first draft than a polished presentation. Many of the
techniques are explained in the same style as the research
paper they came from, and so the book comes across like a series
of synopses, which can make it hard to read. I often found
the explanations unclear -- it didn't read like a book that
had been class tested. Still, I have occasionally found some useful tidbits in the
book, so I gave it two stars rather than one. There's a good
book buried in here -- hopefully the author will prepare a
second edition.
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