Bioinformatics: Sequence and Genome Analysis

Dr. Mount provides an excellent text/guide for those who are interested in making the steep climb into the field of bioinformatics. As a bioinformatics graduate student with an undergraduate degree in biology, I often find that I am over my head in the mathematical jargon that is used in bioinformatics literature. Mount's book gave me the step-up I needed in order to digest the more technically cutting edge alogrithms in the field. He covers all the major areas of bioinformatics (from a biologist's point of view) with the exception of microarray data analysis (which I believe was just coming out at the time the book was printed). I cannot recommend this text more to anyone who is coming into the field. It is especially useful for senior undergraduates or early graduate students. And don't let the price-tag scare you off... CSHL Press books are always expensive, but they are usually worth every nickle.

David Mount did an excellent job introducing bioinformatics to biologists. Without a lot of Mathematics he explains the algorithms used for sequence alignments or phylogenetics, much better than any other book I have seen. Particularly, I found the chapter about Phylogenetic Prediction very helpful, that shows advantages and disadvantages of the numerous phylogenetic analysis programs with a lot of examples and helps the molecular biologist to decide which one to use. Although this book is quiet expensive, I think it is worth every penny!

The book covers a fairly broad range of topics but still manages to teach you something. It is not one of those books that just list a number of nice web sites to visit. You'll get an understandable explanation e.g. of how sequence alignment really works - or phylogenetic trees and so forth. After reading the book you will have actually understood the underlying concepts and algorithms so you could sit down at your computer and start writing little programms. At the same time the math in the book is not overwhelming to biologists who are probably the main audience of this text. For the seasoned programmer there is enough biological applications in the book to get some ideas what to play with.Do I have any complaints? The price is a bit over the top!

This is really the best bioinformatics book I have encountered. My bias is that it seems that most of these books are written by computer scientists for computer scientists. This book is written by a biologist for biologists, and focuses on solving biological problems from the point of view of which tools are good for which jobs. This is an excellent introduction into all sorts of tools that you may want to use, from simple BLAST searches to more complex types of evolutionary trees and the like. As a biologist, I have found this book to be a lot of help, and I wish that I had encountered this book a few years ago. Computer scientists may want more mathematical details, and should look to other books. But as a guide for a biologist, this book can't be beat (and I've looked through a dozen or more other bioinformatics books). As you can see, I can't say enough about this book. If you're a biologist, get this book, and you'll see.

If you are a biologist and just want to know some background information of how to apply bioinformatics to your research, do not read this book. My recommendation for you is "developing bioinformatics computer skills" and some other books like that.If you are a student or scientist who study bioinformatics, this book is an excellent book and really worthy to read. This books gives very detailed information on algorithm to help us understand how the software such as BLAST and FASTA are designed. The illustrations are easy to understand compared with other books I have read, especially for the statistics part of any algorithm.One weak point is that the book focus on nucleic acid sequence analysis while talk little about protein.