A good, concise introduction to Bioinformatics, if dated now
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The title of this book hides a large section on Bioinformatics (Written by Dr. Andy Brass of University of Manchester, UK). Personally, I have only read the chapters written by Brass, so I am unable to comment on the sections written by Alphey. This however no comment that the DNA sequencing section is 'bad', purely that I am a graduate of the MSc Brass runs in Bioinformatics and therefore had more interest in the Bioinformatics section. The field of Bioinformatics is a fast moving one, so some dating of the information after this time is natural. It should be remembered that this book was written in the time when few (if any?) complete genomes of many organisms were know. The recent 'invention' of DNA Microarrays is not really covered as this is 'just' in the future. Some recent advances as the use of HMMs or PSI-BLAST for sequence likewise. However, the general concepts presented are still valid even today, even if a few (of the many) URLs are now as out of date as the screen shots that they are associated with (both the URLs & User interfaces changed long ago, though the resource still exists in an updated form). I have yet to find any information in this book that would be considered to be wrong, either because it was so in the first place or it has been 'proven by time to be a mis-conception.' This book is of value to anybody whom wants a review of the subject in a neat, concise form. It is for these reasons that this book forms a particularly good introduction for undergraduate students taking courses in Bioinformatics or non-Bioinformatics specialists whom normally do 'wet-work.' More 'professional' bioinformatics researchers might however consider it more as a quotable source to refer to illustrate 'a point of opinion' at the time when it was written. The rating of 4 stars (not 5) is due to: i) The misleading title & lack of acknowledgement for Brass in the title (nobody would know that this book contains a large section on Bioinformatics - a bad marketing move, if nothing else) . ii) The dating of the information.
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