Bioinformatics Data Skills

Preface

This book is the answer to a question I asked myself two years ago: “What book would I want to read first when getting started in bioinformatics?” When I began working in this field, I had programming experience in Python and R but little else. I had hunted around for a terrific introductory text on bioinformatics, and while I found some good books, most were not targeted to the daily work I did as a bioinformatician. A few of the texts I found approached bioinformatics from a theoretical and algorithmic perspective, covering topics like Smith-Waterman alignment, phylogeny reconstruction, motif finding, and the like. Although they were fascinating to read (and I do recommend that you explore this material), I had no need to implement bioinformatics algorithms from scratch in my daily bioinformatics work—numerous terrific, highly optimized, well-tested implementations of these algorithms already existed. Other bioinformatics texts took a more practical approach, guiding readers unfamiliar with computing through each step of tasks like running an aligner or downloading sequences from a database. While these were more applicable to my work, much of those books’ material was outdated.

As you might guess, I couldn’t find that best “first” bioinformatics book. Bioinformatics Data Skills is my version of the book I was seeking. This book is targeted toward readers who are unsure how to bridge the giant gap between knowing a scripting language and practicing bioinformatics to ...