Forum:What Is One Book Every Bioinformatician Should Read?

Question

[Philipp Bayer]

Which book do you think helped you the most in your career, or would have helped in your work & career if only you had read it earlier?

(Thread-idea stolen from Stack Overflow)

Answer 1

[Asaf]

The very basics of computational biology Biological Sequence Analysis by Durbin et al

Answer 2

[Malachi Griffith]

Molecular Biology of the Cell

[skymningen]

Additionally (for me it was alternatively) this: http://bcs.whfreeman.com/lodish6e/default.asp?s=&n=&i=&v=&o=&ns=0&uid=0&rau=0

Answer 3

[Gjain]

This is one book which I always find very useful

Bioinformatics: Sequence and Genome Analysis

Answer 4

[Pals]

Practical computing for biologists: http://practicalcomputing.org/

Answer 5

[aravind ramesh]

Including the above books, following listed are also interesting and must read for bioinformaticians.

ML approaches to bioinformatics(Not recommended for all).

A good book on Phylogenetics

Bioinformatics Algorithms.

Structural Bioinformatics

[Gjain]

But if you have to choose one, which one will you choose?

[aravind ramesh]

Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms

[Khader Shameer]

You should list that one book :) !

Answer 6

[Medhat]

this book guided me to the basics of bioinformatics and it was easy to follow

Bioinformatics For Dummies

also

Phylogenetic Trees Made Easy

[Eeyore88]

I actually got Phylogenetic trees made easy it made my dissertation easy and made for an easy read as I don't enjoy reading I prefer hands on learning. It was the easiest read ever.

Answer 7

[zeeefa]

[matt.sarrasin]

Just finished going through this book. I'd say that this should be the required text for an introductory bioinformatics course or for anyone looking to get into the field. It focuses on developing the practical skills and good habits to get started. It's a crash course in Git, UNIX commands, R, Python (less so, however, I'd recommend additional tutorials in Python to compensate).

[Philipp Bayer]

I'm 50% through and I wanted to add it to my own thread :P

I wouldn't recommend it to beginners like lab biologists though, the author himself said here (and in the intro too AFAIK) that it's more on an intermediate level since it assumes a fair amount of prior knowledge - it does assume that you know how to use the shell, know the basics of a Linux file-system, you know how to "think" like a programmer etc.

You could go through it as a beginner and immediately look at the recommended text once you hit a hurdle but I assume that would be very frustrating.

Answer 8

[Charles Warden]

This is the book that I used to learn Perl for my first bioinformatic project:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000806.do

Answer 9

[David Langenberger]

Introduction to Computational Biology

Answer 10

[John]

EITHER

(the father of data viz, although anything by Lima or Yau is good)

OR

(because knowing where to spend your time is so valuable)