Rating: 
Summary: from NATURE STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY review (Dec 99)
Review: "The novice user of bioinformatics tools needs a guide that answers several fundamental questions - what are these tools designed for and what can they do; what are their limitations; how does one access them, and where can one find further information. For each of the basic sub-fields of bioinformatics, Bioinformatics provides a survey, a list of world wide web addresses (URLs), and a list of monographs and reviews to which the reader may go for further information. Each chapter covers fundamental definitions and makes no assumptions about prior knowledge.... The book provides a broad overview of the basic tools for sequence analysis. It is a good starting point for the reader who wants to learn about the types of tools used in bioinfomatics and how to get started. For biologists approaching this subject for the first time, it will be a very useful handbook to keep on the shelf after the first reading, close to the computer." --Terry Gaasterland, The Rockefeller University
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Summary: A great primer for bioinformatics.
Review: A great introduction to bioinformatics with links to biological databases and data mining tools. I have the edition that was written in 1998 so many of the links in the book are now inactive. The book contains good introductory summaries of the algorithms used in the data mining tools discussed. The book however is aimed more at the biologist with little computer knowledge. If you are a computer scientist, the book will be a little boring and I would recommend "Biological Sequence Analysis" by Durbin et al. The price of the book is steep for the amount of pages you are paying for. If price is a consideration in your purchase, I recommend the use of the tutorials on many of the bioinformatics websites such as NCBI, EBI, and Swiss-Prot which are just as good as the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Poorly organized overpriced book
Review: Although the book is presented as an introduction to the topic, its organization assumes that the reader has already been working in the area. Two of the chapters (1 and 17) are a waste of space. The first chapter presents a (useless) introduction to internet, while chapter 17 attempts (and fails to do so) to explain Perl in the context of bioinformatics. For the same money you can find far better books in the market. The good thing is that I only borrowed the book :)
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Summary: Mileading, disappointing, useless
Review: Baxevanis and Ouellete apparently convinced some of their colleagues from NIH (and a few others) to publish user manuals for selected computer programs in the form of edited book. The idea itself is valuable provided that the complete collection of meaningful software is described competently and honestly. Unfortunately the content of this book is limited mostly to the software developed by NCBI and to analyses performed on the UNIX-based workstations. There is almost no coverage of other bioinformatics software (except for the GCG package which contains software and database tools common with NCBI anyway.)Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the book is lack of description of the fundamentals of sequence analysis. With the exception of Chapter 10 one cannot learn sequence analysis from this volume. Nor would it be advisable to use it as a desk reference to find appropriate citations of published sequence analysis work. A vast majority of references cited is biased. Merits of the citations' content do not seem to matter to the editors and that makes their book almost useless for the would-be practitioners. I hasten to admonish that the book appears to be primarily a software marketing material and not an effort to educate or otherwise empower the reader. I am surprised that the material covered by the book is not distributed free of charge via Internet or other publicly available means. 9 out of 16 contributors (I refer here to the first edition) are actively working for the US Government at the time of writing. Still their chapters appear to be copyrighted by the publisher instead of being in public domain. But these are all minor problems comparing to the misgivings of the book's content mentioned in the first two paragraphs of this note.
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Summary: Great book, easy to follow, expert authors
Review: Five stars, a great place for people like me (trained as a biochemist) to start in a field that I know is going to be more and more important as to how I do my work in the future. I've been able to use basic things like BLAST more effectively, and finally understand that there are other ways to look at sequence besides BLAST and how to apply those tools to my own sequences. I really like the Entrez chapter, since Entrez does so much more than I ever realized it could do! I haven't ventured into the advanced territory yet (like microarrays), but at least I understand what I'm hearing in seminars now and what all those red and green spots actually represent. I read the review by "a reader in Cambridge, MA", and don't understand what their beef is with this title. The authors have tried (and have succeeded) in pointing the readers to the best PUBLIC DOMAIN software out there, augmenting documentation that's generally lacking. Have you ever tried finding good docs on the NCBI Web site? Well, these two editors got them for you. UNIX-centric? I can't speak for the first edition, but check out the second edition and see that there's tons of Netscape screen dumps demonstrating the tools and making things as easy as possible for the reader. I originally bought this because of the reviews published in Science and Cell and a slew of other journals, all favorable, so the "reader in Cambridge" seems out of step with all of the published journal reviews of the book. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I just wanted to point this out for a sense of balance here, especially since my own experience was so different.
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Summary: Bioinformatic for the beginner...
Review: I guess that everybody interrested by this kind of book knows already a little about bioinformatic and wants to improve his bioinformatician skill. So forget about this book:
This is really a well-documented introduction to all the methods currently used by every biologist or biology student, such as Blast, Clustal, multiple alignement or use of web-interface for submiting sequence.
So get it if you need a clear introduction to the field, but if you already know a little bit about bioinfo, immediately choose a more detailed book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Broad-Based Coverage
Review: I own both the first and second editions of this book, and really think they're great. The second edition really is a brand-new book, seeing how far this field has come in a short period of time, with a lot of new material in the second edition, like on sequence assembly, comparative genomics, and BioPerl. Looking at the chapters that have been retained from the first edition, there has been extensive rewrites -- pretty impressive for a "new edition" that's now almost 100 pages thicker than the first edition was. I also like how the second edition broadens out to resources available throughout the world, using a wider set of authors (meaning well beyond NCBI) than the first edition did. Baxevanis and Ouellette seem to have a very good sense not just for where the field is, but where the field is going, and who the major players are -- the inclusion of a chapter on whole-genome analysis (microarrays) is evidence of that, material that doesn't appear in any of the other available titles, to my knowledge. I can see how an advanced reader interested in the mathematics underlying commonly-used bioinformatics technqiues would move to a title like Durbin et al., and these two books really are the "best in class" -- start with the Baxevanis title, and move onto the Durbin title from there. They're really the only two you'll need. I personally don't know anyone who's been disappointed by these two books.
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Summary: ...
Review: I used the Baxevanis volume in coursework at Johns Hopkins Biotechnology program...several of the chapter authors are associated with the school. There's no doubt that the editor and authors are experts in their fields, but the volume seems somewhat dated, and is disjointed. I found a couple of the chapters virtually unreadable. The real killer is the price. The book is GROSSLY overpriced... ...
Rating:
Summary: The Best Bioinformatics Book I've Bought
Review: I've looked at quite a few of the books in the field, but this one really stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. The people putting the book together are the experts in the field, and often are the ones who developed the techniques or the strategies that more and more of us depend on in trying to analyze our sequence data -- if you're gonna learn, might as well learn from the experts. The practical nature of the book has been very helpful to me in my work, striking a nice balance between the theory and practice -- some of the other books are either too mathematical or too hand-wavy. I also appreciate having the problem sets at the ends of the chapters, so I can see if I actually understood what I read. If I were teaching, I could easily see this making a really nice textbook. In Eric Lander's forward, the authors are given high marks and praise -- if he thinks so, then that's good enough for me!
Rating: 
Summary: Somewhat more than an out-of-date catalog of tools
Review: Like any survey, it seems to touch the major features only. And, as others have pointed out, the tools change but the book doesn't.
I think this is a good, brief introduction to the wide variety of bioinformatic tools and databases on the internet. It describes the major features of each, and the kinds of results that each tool is good for. After that, the serious user will go to the sources of each tool or database, to learn more about the specifics as of the moment. No book can hope to keep up with the weekly enhancements at the major repositories.
I emphasize that this is for tools users, not tool makers. It addresses the working scientists who already know their subjects and their needs. This skips over the algorithms in favor of higher level descriptions, and skips over many of the biological reasons for the tools described. Better-informed tool users get better answers from the tools, true. At some point, though, the biologists want to skip the theory, skip the introduction to subjects in which they're experts, and get on with their science. I don't think this book was ever meant for people - and I'm one - who want full details of the algorithms.
I agree, the book treats its many subjects in a shallow way. I think that is by intent, since the book's real goal is breadth and its target is a reader who knows the basic science. It's a bit off the center of my interests, but I've found it helpful.
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