Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book for Perl in Bioinformatics
Review: I think this book is very good for anyone who wants to learn Perl for using in Bioinformatics. I had previous programming knowledge but I did not know Perl, and this book certainly helped me a lot. The exercises at the end are good. I would definitely recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Very good for bioinformatics beginners from CS background
Review: I think this is a very good book for people from Computer Science background who just enter the field of Bioinformatics. It shows fundamental Bioinformatics concepts, tools in the process of teaching people Perl basics--which suits CS people very well. It has a clear interpretation of important Perl must-knows, lots of useful examples.
Rating: 
Summary: Yes, it is beginning perl for bioinformatics beginners!
Review: If don't know what is PERL, go ahead and start with this book! He gives some brief introduction into perl and teaches you how to start writing code on day 1. The book is good in that sense there
are simple excercises at the end of each chapter! If you are already a bioinformatician or a programmer don't spend a dime on buying it! Major drawbacks are : Ignores details on Obj-O or module based programming.......! He calls accessing/reformatting some of the Blast output, pdb files, FASTA files as Bioinformatics......! That is some what disappointing. Pattern match 101 has been demonstrated using some simple examples...... certainly a delight to beginners of both Bioinformatics and PERL..... and a disappointment for people who already know something in both the field!E&OE!
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable introduction, but there are more thorough books
Review: One can enjoyably learn some Perl and genomics from Tisdall, but a more thorough approach is first using a dedicated Perl primer, like Pierce's ,Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours, or Schwartz & Chistiansen's, Learning Perl, and then studying the professional toolkit in Dwyer's Genomic Perl which is accompanied by 65 intuitively derived programs and modules.
Rating:
Summary: A friendly and excellent introduction to perl for biologists
Review: The author presents Perl in a thorough, well organized fashion,always reinforcing the use of the basic tools ...scalars,arrays,hashes, regular expressions,loops and subroutines,parsing data banks,relational databases,perl modules,program design and so on.He presents clearly ,giving many examples of real life biological problems. It assumes little if any programming background, although a knowledge of C and Unix would be very helpful. This is definitely a must for anyone learning Perl for molecular biology. 5 stars ++
Rating:
Summary: The definitive Perl primer in bioinformatics
Review: This book manages to be an astounding introduction to actually using Perl in general as well as a good introduction to its use in bioinformatics. It's also very readable. Needs more than 5 stars!
Rating: 
Summary: Superb book. But if you can, wait until next reprint
Review: This is certainly a superb book. I really enjoyed it. Here are some of the advantages of "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" over other entry level general purpose Perl books such as "Learning Perl". (1) Most importantly, you learn Perl in the context of dealing with biological problems (e.g., parsing BLAST output) rather than general problems that will not even remotly interest you (e.g., parsing employee's address list). So you will be kept interested throughout the book.
(2) Entire codes, rather than code snippets, are presented.
(3) Explanations are much more friendly and clear.
(4) You can find some useful materials that are not covered in Learning Perl; for example, using Perl debugger, using range operator to skip lines, etc. One problem with this book is that there are TONS of errata (I'm referring to October 2001, 1st edition). Most of their corrections are available from the book website, and half of them are re-phrasing of sentences, so errata will not prevent you from understanding the book. But it certainly takes significant amount of time to go through the HUGE list of errata corrections (I also found more than ten additional errata that are not found in the errata list and reported to publisher). So if it's not urgent for you, wait until next reprint becomes available. One more wish list is that Bioperl module could have been covered (It is briefly mentioned over seven pages but not actually covered). It is covered, however, to some degree by the sequel of this book titled "Mastering perl for bioinformatics" which is written by the same author.
Rating:
Summary: Great introduction
Review: This is the first book that I read about Perl and also the first one that I read about Bioinformatics. I think it has an enough level of details so that readers who have little or no Bioinformatics background can easily understand the basics, and readers who wants to focus more on Perl usage in Bioinformatics can also get quick and useful examples such as interpreting BLAST output, and regular expressions.
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