Perl Programming for Biologists

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 208 pages
• Published by: Wiley-Liss
• Edition: 1st Edition July 14, 2003
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0471430595
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0471430599
• Book Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 0.5 inches
• Weighs: 13.6 ounces

Product Review
"not be surprised to see [it] finding a space on the bookshelves in many biological laboratories in the near future." -- Briefings in Bioinformatics, Vol 5(1), March 2004

"This well written book illustrates PERL with examples…Those with less or no programming skills should read this book before attempting the practice of bioinformatics ideas." (Journal of Statistical Computation & Simulation, January 2005)

"…the book is useful to biologists who already use languages like C+ or Visual Basic and want to learn Perl." (Biomolecular Engineering, November 2004)

“…written in a pleasant chatty style with obvious enthusiasm for the topic” (Robotica, Vol. 22, 2004)

“unique and I highly recommend it as a first book on programming for biology-oriented professionals interested in  using perlexcellent for self-studycan also be a great resource as classroom material” (Clinical Chemistry, Vol. 50, No. 2, 2004)

"not be surprised to see [it] finding a space on the bookshelves in many biological laboratories in the near future." (Briefings in Bioinformatics, Vol 5(1), March 2004)

Product Description
Working on the assumption that the reader has no formal training in programming, Perl Programming for Biologists demonstrates how Perl is used to solve biological problems. Each chapter opens with a set of learning objectives, provides numerous review questions and self-study exercises, and concludes with a bulleted summary of key points. The author incorporates numerous real-life examples throughout the text. Upon completing the book, readers are able to quickly perform such tasks as correcting recurring errors in spreadsheets, scanning a Fasta sequence for every occurrence of an EcoRI site, adapting other writers' scripts to one's own purposes, and most important, writing reusable and maintainable scripts that spare the rote repetition of code.

Reader Reviews
Although James Tisdall's Perl books (Beginning/Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics) could be a little scattered, I found that they offered more for the biologist learning Perl than this one; you could almost buy both those books for the price of this one! This book seems structured more along the lines of the (superior) Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl by Schwartz et al, with a few biological references thrown in as examples. Some of the most important aspects of biological sequence analysis were glossed over fairly quickly if at all. I found it somewhat amazing that file format parsing, restriction enzyme analysis, sequence conversion, transcription-translation, program output parsing, and other fundamental topics were either covered very briefly in passing or not covered at all. Disappointing! I believe one might find this book was a great read first time out (it is well written), but that once they progressed to other texts (Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl, Programming Perl), they would rarely, if ever, refer back to this one. That's not good for a $50 book. I can't see myself using it in the future when I have the Camel and Llama covering my back, along with Tisdall's texts. Basically a lot of sugar coating without much substance. Oh, and there's a major mistake in the Object-Oriented Programming section, one which really breaks your programs. In short : -