Customer Reviews
Brings strands of knowledge together - By: bluejohn, 11 Oct 2008 
My science background is well out-of-date. In this book I can find several half understood concepts brought together, well explained & illuminating each other to an amazing extent. It's really rather exciting!
A great introductory book - By: , 25 Jun 2004 This is an excellent introduction to this up-and-coming field. Bioinformatics one of many fields that is inherently inter-disciplinary, with biologists comingin & needing to learn computer science, & computer scientists comingin & needing to learn biology. I think that the book is very useful for both groups. I have a computer science background & did not find any of the biology overly difficult. So I highly recommend it for anyone, from the undergraduate to the postrgraduate or professional.
The book covers all of the major topicsin bioinformatics, & touches on several of the minor ones. There are 5 long chapters:
Chapter 1 Introduction: introduces the basics of the field, describing the basics of data archiving, the WWW, computers & computer programming, biological classification & nomenclature, phylogenetic relationships & use of sequences, PSI-BLAST, & protein structure.
Chapter 2 Genome organization & evolution: genomics & proteomics, methods of genetic information transmission, genes & genomes, SNPs, genome evolution.
Chapter 3 Archives & information retrieval: this contains a detailed discussion of various databases & how to interact with them.
Chapter 4 Alignments & phylogenetic trees: this vast majority of this chapter covers many aspects of the important area of sequence alignment, including BLAST & HMMs. Then it has short sections on phylogeny & phylogenetic trees, again covering the basics.
Chapter 5 Protein structure & drug discovery: this starts with protein folding, & deals with hydrophobicity, structural alignments, DALI, & then evolution, classification & prediction of protein structures & function. Finally it touches on drug discoveryin this context.
One of the nice things about this book is the code samples, writtenin the bioinformatician's favorite language, Perl. These are printed & discussedin the book, but then also available on the web site that is associated with the book, so you don't have to type itin yourself. In addition to the programs, the website also has graphics from the book, many of which rotate so you can see them from different positions (can't get thatin a book!). It also has the web links mentionedin the book, so you can explore them more conveniently than having to flip through the book & type the URLs in.
An excellent beginner's guide to bioinformatics - By: , 27 Apr 2002 This is a superb introduction to the subject of bioinformatics. It is very well written, & for the first time (thanks to this book) I can understand what hidden Markov models are about. It invites comparison with another book of the same name, namely "Introduction to Bioinformatics" by Attwood & Parry-Smith. The book by Lesk has two advantages (three, I suppose, if you include the fact that it is a more recent publication): it uses everyday, non-biological analogies to explain many of the concepts that are otherwise difficult to grasp, & it also covers molecular modelling.
Advanced undergraduate students tackling bioinformatics for the first time, or research students whose experience of bioinformatics is limited to the odd BLAST search & surfing through genomes, will find this book a must have. You will wonder how you ever got by without it.
