Biology Exploring Life See Perl for Exploring DNA Details
List Price : $125.00 Price : $96.96
as of 2012-07-29 04:20 AM
Product Description
This book presents Perl programming with a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective for the bioinformatics classroom. The co-authors are a professor of computer science and a professor of biology who collaborate in developing software for DNA sequence analysis. A specialty of the authors is encouraging interdisciplinary undergraduate research. The book has been tested in the classroom as a text for both biology and computer science majors. Benefiting from years of teaching experience in both computer science and biology, the authors use an exceptionally friendly and pedagogically sound introduction to Perl that emphasizes good programming practices throughout. Concepts include a rich introduction to working with strings and files of sequence data, control structures, subroutines, and data structures (e.g., arrays and hash tables). A particularly unique feature of the text is the early and repeated exposure to and use of regular expressions in sequence analysis. All examples in the book are applied to biological sequence analysis (DNA analysis, Protein analysis). The full-length book is appropriate for majors in either computer science or biology and especially relevant for new interdisciplinary courses involving students from multiple disciplines.
Perl for Exploring DNA Reviews
Biology Exploring Life : Perl for Exploring DNA Reviews
| 6 of 6 people found the following review helpful  great first perl book, By This review is from: Perl for Exploring DNA (Paperback) I really disagree with the negative reviews here. This is a GREAT book for the biologist who is making their first foray into perl programming. Maybe a professional programmer would take issue with presentation format -- but as a PhD. biologist with little programming experience - I can tell you that this has been a wonderful resource for me. I worked through the book cover to cover while simultaneously writing some programs for my own work. I feel very comfortable with the overall logic of the language now and ready to take on more complex texts.In addition, the book is well-written and includes a great deal of interesting background on both molecular biology and programming. Frankly, if I were teaching a graduate course in this area I would not hesitate to take this as a textbook. The writing is clear and the progression of subjects logical. It would hold students' interest, certainly. 6 of 7 people found the following review helpful  Great beginner guide to Perl, By This review is from: Perl for Exploring DNA (Paperback) "Perl for Exploring DNA" should have been named "Beginner Perl for Exploring DNA" instead. That sums up the scope and level of detail in the book. I think as a compromise between teaching Perl and using Perl for DNA analysis it succeeds. In fact I would recommend it to beginner Perl programmers interested in text analysis over most other beginner Perl books in the market. Complex data structures are explained well, though late in the book.I can appreciate the formidable task of trying to present Perl to biologists. There are many ideas and techniques that come naturally to someone trained in computer science or engineering, but which are arcane or counter-intuitive to everyone else. Something like CPAN, to address a previous review of the book which mentioned that CPAN was not prominent enough, seems painfully necessary to a programmer but requires a good understanding of many aspects of Perl (including the CPAN shell). It's not easy to present these concepts,... Read more 5 of 6 people found the following review helpful Excellent interdisciplinary text for bioinformatics, By This review is from: Perl for Exploring DNA (Paperback) I used Perl for Exploring DNA (PEDNA) for an undergraduate course in Bioinformatics last spring, and have adopted it once again for this fall. Our course is cross-listed and co-taught by our college's CS and Biology departments, and students who register come from the same variety of backgrounds. I searched for a long time to find an appropriate text to support the CS content in the course, and despite my initial reluctance to use Perl (my preferences would have been more for Ruby or Python), on the strength of the PEDNA approach adopted this text. Things worked out very well, and I couldn't be happier with the results.Why PEDNA, then? The truth is, the language doesn't matter as long as it supports the goal of teaching computer science and biology students to speak each other's language and participate mutually in the process of problem solving and algorithm design. A text that assumes the reader has a programming background can be intimidating to a reader who does not,... Read more |
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