Books about Bioinformatics from Amazon.com

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 analyze 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 every 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 amazed 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 protein sequences
• Conduct similarity searches
• Build a multiple sequence alignment
• Edit and publish alignments
• Visualize protein 3-D structures
• Construct phylogenetic trees

This up-to-date second edition includes newly created and popular databases and Internet 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 PC and the right Web tools so you’ll be searching databases and analyzing sequences like a pro!.
Price: $8.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The practice of modern medicine requires sophisticated information technologies with which to manage patient information, plan diagnostic procedures, interpret laboratory results, and conduct research. This book, inspired by a Stanford University training program developed to introduce health professionals to computer applications in modern medical care, fills the need for a high quality text in computers and medicine, and meets the growing demand by practitioners, researchers, and students for a comprehensive introduction to key topics in the field. The work is designed for a broad audience interested in the intersection of computer science and medicine.

Completely revised and expanded, the Third Edition (previously titled "Medical Informatics") includes several new chapters filled with brand new material. This book will provide both a conceptual framework and a practical approach for the implementation and management of IT used to improve the delivery of health care. Designed for use by professors and students of medical informatics and for practicing professionals, this book will focus on the role of computers in the provision of medical services. Biomedial Informatics, Third Edition, provides the conceptual base needed to comprehend and utilize medical informatics through easy to understand examples that demonstrate how computers assist in the delivery of health care. This text also includes pointers to additional literature, chapter summaries, and concise definition of recurring terms for self-study or classroom use.

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Price: $61.71 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Biology, it seems, is a good showcase for the talents of Perl. Newcomers to Perl who understand biological information will find James Tisdall's Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics to be an excellent compendium of examples. Teachers of Perl will likewise find the text to be filled with fresh programming illustrations of growing scientific importance. Seasoned Perlmongers who want to learn biology, however, should search elsewhere, as Tisdall's emphasis is on Perl's logic rather than Mother Nature's.

Departing from O'Reilly's earlier monograph Developing Bioinformatic Computer Skills, Tisdall's text is organized aggressively along didactic lines. Nearly all of the 13 chapters begin with twin bullet lists of Perl programming tools and the bioinformatic methods that require them. Likewise, the chapters end with exercises. String concatenation is illustrated with gene splicing, and regular expressions are taught with gene transcription and motif searching.

Tisdall emphasizes sequence examples throughout, leading up to an introduction to a Perl interface for the NIH GenBank biological database and the widely used BLAST sequence alignment tool. After a brief discussion of three-dimensional protein structure, he returns to sequence extraction and secondary structure prediction.

Tisdall's goal is to boost the beginning programmer into a domain of self-learning. He imparts essential etiquette for the success of programming newbies: use the wealth or resources available, from user documentation to Web site surveys to FAQs to How-To's to news groups and finally to direct personal appeals for help from a senior colleague. A well-plugged-in bioinformatics Perl student will soon discover Bioperl, an open-source effort to bring research-grade bioinformatic tools to the Perl community. Bioperl is described briefly at the end of Tisdall's book and will reportedly be a forthcoming title of its own in the O'Reilly bioinformatics series.

Although he introduces bioinformatics as an academic discipline, Tisdall treats it as a trade throughout his book. He indicates that open questions and computational hard problems exist, but does not describe what they are or how they are being tackled. Ultimately, Tisdall presents bioinformatics as another arrow in a bench scientist's quiver, very much like HPLC, 2D-PAGE, and the various spectroscopies.

As odd as a "bioinformatics-as-tool" book may be to its research proponents, the reduction of bioinformatics to trade status both deflates and vindicates the years of research, as Tisdall's work attests. --Peter Leopold.
Price: $18.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This introductory text offers a clear exposition of the algorithmic principles driving advances in bioinformatics Accessible to students in both biology and computer science, it strikes a unique balance between rigorous mathematics and practical techniques, emphasizing the ideas underlying algorithms rather than offering a collection of apparently unrelated problems.

The book introduces biological and algorithmic ideas together, linking issues in computer science to biology and thus capturing the interest of students in both subjects. It demonstrates that relatively few design techniques can be used to solve a large number of practical problems in biology, and presents this material intuitively.

An Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms is one of the first books on bioinformatics that can be used by students at an undergraduate level. It includes a dual table of contents, organized by algorithmic idea and biological idea; discussions of biologically relevant problems, including a detailed problem formulation and one or more solutions for each; and brief biographical sketches of leading figures in the field. These interesting vignettes offer students a glimpse of the inspirations and motivations for real work in bioinformatics, making the concepts presented in the text more concrete and the techniques more approachable.

PowerPoint presentations, practical bioinformatics problems, sample code, diagrams, demonstrations, and other materials can be found at the Author's website..
Price: $32.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This richly illustrated book describes the use of interactive and dynamic graphics as part of multidimensional data analysis Chapters include clustering, supervised classification, and working with missing values. A variety of plots and interaction methods are used in each analysis, often starting with brushing linked low-dimensional views and working up to manual manipulation of tours of several variables. The role of graphical methods is shown at each step of the analysis, not only in the early exploratory phase, but in the later stages, too, when comparing and evaluating models.

All examples are based on freely available software: GGobi for interactive graphics and R for static graphics, modeling, and programming. The printed book is augmented by a wealth of material on the web, encouraging readers follow the examples themselves. The web site has all the data and code necessary to reproduce the analyses in the book, along with movies demonstrating the examples.

The book may be used as a text in a class on statistical graphics or exploratory data analysis, for example, or as a guide for the independent learner. Each chapter ends with a set of exercises.

The authors are both Fellows of the American Statistical Association, past chairs of the Section on Statistical Graphics, and co-authors of the GGobi software. Dianne Cook is Professor of Statistics at Iowa State University. Deborah Swayne is a member of the Statistics Research Department at AT&T Labs.

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Price: $45.77 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Bioinformatics--the application of computational and analytical methods to biological problems--is a rapidly evolving scientific discipline. Genome sequencing projects are producing vast amounts of biological data for many different organisms, and, increasingly, storing these data in public databases. Such biological databases are growing exponentially, along with the biological literature. It's impossible for even the most zealous researcher to stay on top of necessary information in the field without the aid of computer-based tools. Bioinformatics is all about building these tools. Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills is for scientists and students who are learning computational approaches to biology for the first time, as well as for experienced biology researchers who are just starting to use computers to handle their data. The book covers the Unix file system, building tools and databases for bioinformatics, computational approaches to biological problems, an introduction to Perl for bioinformatics, data mining, and data visualization. Written in a clear, engaging style, Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills will help biologists develop a structured approach to biological data as well as the tools they'll need to analyze the data..
Price: $8.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]