Bioinformatics For Dummies
June 19, 2010 by BiotechSector.com
Filed under Biomedical Engineering
Bioinformatics For Dummies
- ISBN13: 9780470089859
- Condition: USED – VERY GOOD
- Notes:
Were you always curious about biology but were afraid to sit through long hours of dense reading? Did you like the subject when you were in high school but had other plans after you graduated? Now you can explore the human genome and examine DNA without ever leaving your desktop!
Bioinformatics For Dummies is packed with valuable information that introduces you to this exciting new discipline. This easy-to-follow guide leads you step by step through each bioinformatics task that can be done over the Internet. Forget long equations, computer-geek gibberish, and installing bulky programs that slow down your computer. You’ll be astonished at all the things you can accomplish just by logging on and following these trusty directions. You get the tools you need to:
- Analyze all types of sequences
- Use all types of databases
- Work with DNA and accelerator sequences
- Conduct similarity searches
- Build a multiple sequence alignment
- Edit and publish alignments
- Visualize accelerator 3-D structures
- Construct phylogenetic trees
This up-to-date second edition includes newly created and favourite databases and World wide web programs as well as multiple new genomes. It provides tips for using servers and places to seek resources to find out about what’s going on in the bioinformatics world. Bioinformatics For Dummies will show you how to get the most out of your computer and the right Web tools so you’ll be searching databases and examining sequences like a pro!
Rating: 
(out of 18 reviews)
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Review by for Bioinformatics For Dummies
Rating:
I have used databases before (mostly NCBI, TIGR and SWISS PROT) and yet, this book (presumably for dummies) has shown me so much more(which say a lot about me)! It is accurate and gives good step by step guide to how to perform many tasks – from how to find a gene to using the analysis tools and to exploring some of the newer features of these databases – and the areas like you have never looked into before.
It is a well-researched book and the authors are clearly knowledgeable in this area.Even though I have been for a 4-day bioinformatics course (6 months ago), which I thought was pretty good, this book still had so much to offer. Using this book, I was easily able to substitute the proteins of my interest into their examples and generated meaningful hits.The book also covers deeper and more advanced features of BLAST, discusses sequence alignments using several types of algorithm and even has a section on 3D structures. Towards the end of book – it features a section on working with mRNA and building phylogenetics trees – which again are excellent resources for teachers involved in teaching beginners molecular biology.I am a teacher teaching at a Pre-unversity level. The way the book is structured also lends its material to be modified into lesson materials for training students. It is really a great book! Worth every dollar I spent on it!
Review by me for Bioinformatics For Dummies
Rating:
I hold a masters degree in computer sciences (so in fact I am a biology dummy), but always had a strong interest for sciences. So I want to delve deeply into this fascinating area, but first wanted to read a book to quickly introduce me the basic concepts. With this background, I must say the book is a little bit disappointing. You can clearly see that this book is written with the biologist in mind, definitely not the computer scientist.
The biological concepts are not explained very well for a biology dummy, let me explain you why :
1. Some basic biological concepts are not explained. I wanted to have some more explanation on the basic concepts of how molecular and cell biology works. A lot of times, the autors tell you how to use some tool, but is not always clearly explained to me why, for what purpose they use the tool. For instance they explain how to find a list of related protein sequences, but for me it is not clear why biologists need to have such a list. And this is only one example, I could give much more simular examples…
2. Remember guys, I am a dummy, so please explain me the difference between a gene and a genome before using these terms. And also, I heard about chromosomes, but why do you not explain what is it exactly ?. Also, there are a lot of explanations on how to work with RNA, but please explain me more about the functional difference between RNA and DNA.
3. The explanations on how to use serveral internet tools are too wordy, they spent several pages explaining things that are so intuitively clear like “click this or that button”, “use menu file, edit, copy to past your stuff to the computer clipboard”….
4. A lot of complex terms are or not explained the first time they use it (”phylogenic”). Sometimes these terms are explained further in the book, but from a didactical standpoint, you should at least give an informal definition when you first use some concepts…
Conclusion: I currently read the first hundred pages of the book and maybe I will change this review later on. But I can already tell : the first chapters might be well suited for a computer dummy, but definitely not for a biology dummy. However with some help of the internet(for instance there is an excellent explanation on how cells work at the howstuffworks website http://science.howstuffworks.com/cell.htm), I will continue to read the book further. Maybe after that I will need to change my preview…
Review by Tamsen De Valoir for Bioinformatics For Dummies
Rating:
“Bioinformatics for Dummies” is an excellent resource. It is clear, easy to read, well organized and illustrated. I was particularly pleased by the colloquial tone of the writing: in addition to being informative, it was fun to read!As a scientist who spends at least half of my time BLASTing, I also read it for accuracy and found it to almost error-free (any errors were in the figures). Additionally, most of the web pages were up-to-date, although as time passes the links will decay and web pages will change their look. In addition, the book contained enough in-depth content to teach me several new tricks of the trade. Further, I believe the book had sufficient background material to educate the novice. To test this, I gave the manual to a material science chemist and he was able to understand the material, at least until he decided it was more than he wanted to know and quit reading.This is a useful text for those who want to know more than an operational definition of bioinformatics and a must for the library of all bioinformatics users.
Review by Solanum for Bioinformatics For Dummies
Rating:
I am a couple years into a PhD in bioinformatics, but this is the book I started with. I knew some biology and some computer science, but I still found a lot of the databases, etc. confusing and the field has a decided lack of simplified documentation (though it is getting better).
Of course, bioinformatics is a pretty broad topic and no book could possibly cover everything.
If you do not know any biology at all you probably should also get a basic text on genetics/molecular biology (or read thema at the NCBI web site books section for free). You don’t need anything in depth to read the dummies book, just at the level of an introductory biology book. Hint: DNA to RNA, RNA to Protein. And you want to know why proteins are similar because proteins with similar amino acid sequences often have similar chemical properties and therefore similar functions, so if you know what one protein does you can guess what a protein like it probably does.
And despite the name of the book the authors are REAL bioinformaticists (T-Coffee rocks!)
Review by J. M. Ridlon for Bioinformatics For Dummies
Rating:
In spite of the title (I don’t know many dummies interested in multiple sequence alignments) this reference is written by experts in the field of bioinformatics and is very accessable for the beginner. I purchased this book as a beginning graduate student so that I could learn which programs to use to compare amino acid and nucleic acid sequences as well as prepare them for publication and this book was perfect for this end. This text doesn’t delve into the algorithms or much theory (which is learned through practice and other sources), nevertheless, I recommend this for the researcher for a crash course or quick reference. This book really helped me get my feet wet in this area (and recently publish a nice alignment) and will certainly reduce my workload next semester for my bioinformatics course!