Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics

Rating:
Summary: Nice survey of topics, but not too deep on any one thing
Review: "Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics" is the follow-up to Tisdall's earlier "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics". Both books are part of O'Reilly's lauded "animal books" series; "Beginning" was graced with tadpoles, while "Mastering" sports a frog.

Naturally, this book picks up where the earlier one left off, diving headfirst into the details of Perl modules. Chapter two is a quick pass over some basic data structures, with discussion of how you'd implement each in Perl. Subsequent chapters cover object-oriented programming in Perl, using Perl with relational databases, using Perl with web services, generating graphics on the fly with Perl, and the use of the Bioperl suite of libraries.

As might be expected, all the coding examples in the book are drawn from reasonably realistic bioinformatics situations. There's a little bit less hand-holding on the biological side in this book, relative to the earlier volume -- which I think is a good idea, as it gives more space to focus on the programming material.

The one weakness of this book is that it covers quite a few topics, which means that it doesn't really go into great depth on any of them. The "survey" approach is well done, and it's very nice to have biologically relevant examples and exercises for the breath of material that is addressed, but I think the book might have been stronger if it forewent the "Perl and the Web" and "Perl and Graphics" chapters in favor of more focus on the Bioperl libraries.

If you're a bioinformatics programmer who enjoyed "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics", and you want to get a better idea of what more advanced Perl programming looks like and what sorts of things you can do with Perl, this book is a nice place to start. However, if you're looking for more specific information, other more focused books might be a better choice, if you can live without the biologically focused code examples.

Rating:
Summary: Nice survey of topics, but not too deep on any one thing
Review: "Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics" is the follow-up to Tisdall's earlier "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics". Both books are part of O'Reilly's lauded "animal books" series; "Beginning" was graced with tadpoles, while "Mastering" sports a frog.

Naturally, this book picks up where the earlier one left off, diving headfirst into the details of Perl modules. Chapter two is a quick pass over some basic data structures, with discussion of how you'd implement each in Perl. Subsequent chapters cover object-oriented programming in Perl, using Perl with relational databases, using Perl with web services, generating graphics on the fly with Perl, and the use of the Bioperl suite of libraries.

As might be expected, all the coding examples in the book are drawn from reasonably realistic bioinformatics situations. There's a little bit less hand-holding on the biological side in this book, relative to the earlier volume -- which I think is a good idea, as it gives more space to focus on the programming material.

The one weakness of this book is that it covers quite a few topics, which means that it doesn't really go into great depth on any of them. The "survey" approach is well done, and it's very nice to have biologically relevant examples and exercises for the breath of material that is addressed, but I think the book might have been stronger if it forewent the "Perl and the Web" and "Perl and Graphics" chapters in favor of more focus on the Bioperl libraries.

If you're a bioinformatics programmer who enjoyed "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics", and you want to get a better idea of what more advanced Perl programming looks like and what sorts of things you can do with Perl, this book is a nice place to start. However, if you're looking for more specific information, other more focused books might be a better choice, if you can live without the biologically focused code examples.

Rating:
Summary: Not bad
Review: Basically, this book further develops the author's previous work "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" on procedural Perl scripting to object-oriented Perl programming.

You will learn the OOP aspects of Perl in the context of biological problems. For example, this book explains the OOP concepts by developing a Gene class that stores information about a gene. In other books such as Conway's "Object oriented Perl", CD::Music class is given as an example, which I found very boring.

The leap from procedural Perl scripting to object-oriented Perl programming is nontrivial to learn, and I'm sure that this book helps.

Bioperl is the subject of chapter 9 (about 40 pages), and it could have been better if there were more thorough treatment about this module.

Readers may also find useful the chapters 6 (DBI), 7 (CGI), and 8 (GD).

If you are new to Perl, read first "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics", then this book, because this book assumes that you already have the level of Perl knowledge that can be acquired by that previous book.

Rating:
Summary: as the title implies, it is for bioinformatician
Review: Just browsing through this, I can see this book will be very useful for me (as a student majoring in bioinformatics).
A very book explaining area most used in bioinformatics, and the price is ok for a 'starving student'.

Rating:
Summary: Great book, leads to others for true mastery
Review: Published in late 2003, this clearly-written book picks up where "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" leaves off. Perl is very commonly used in the field of bioinformatics, and this book does a good job of surveying the more advanced topics in perl from the bioinformatics point-of-view. For a more thorough treatment of each of these topics though, the student will need to explore more specialized titles.

While Tisdall's first volume teaches the core of procedural programming in Perl, this one takes you into the world of object-oriented (OO) programming. The first two chapters explore namespaces, modules, packages, references and data structures, all of which are prerequisites to OO programming. Common bioinformatics algorithms are introduced such as dynamic programming and approximate string matching.

The next three chapters, 3-5, are the meat of this title. Here objects, methods and classes are introduced. Rather than just throwing out independent examples, these topics are developed by starting and building upon a Gene class, the first of several through which Tisdall guides the reader. Due to the practicality of these examples, they can even be used and improved by the reader for use in their own work.

After this decent treatment of OO programming the book takes a turn into other realms of perl, each of which seems to have been written as a short introduction and for which other O'Reilly titles offer more complete coverage. These topics include the use of Perl to access relational databases, CGI programming and graphics generation using GD. If interested in any of these the reader should check out "Programming the Perl DBI", "CGI Programming with Perl" and "Perl Graphics Programming", respectively.

Tisdall wraps up with a much-needed coverage of Bioperl, a large collection of Perl modules for common bioinformatics operations. I looked forward to this section most of all and was fairly disappointed with its brief, 28-page coverage. The entire chapter can currently be downloaded for free from O'Reilly's website as a PDF, but the Bioperl website has better examples and even a contributed course, though good documentation is still lacking in some areas.

In all, I like this book because it does a good review of introducing object-oriented programming in Perl using relevant bioinformatics examples and introduces the reader to other topics including the DBI, CGI, and GD modules. While I believe this makes the book very useful, the coverage of each of the topics in this book will certainly not give the reader a mastery of any of them. For that, one will need to check out the three previously mentioned titles, along with "Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules." This book does a fine job of introducing these four titles from the bioinformatician's perspective.