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Rating: 
Summary: Not well written...
Review: I am not an informatics researcher, however I hold a doctorate in biotechnology related areas, as well a law degree. I routinely purchase books and journals to keep up. However, the problem with this book is its presentation. It is written in an almost stereotypically pretentious manner to the extent that it clearly detracts from the subject matter's presentation. Did you know that a tissue or cell type may be "interrogated"? Coincedentally, I happened upon a brief review article by the same author in Nature Biotech. Again the writing was such that it was too much of an effort to extract what was being said. For those who feel drawn to this book, check the internal pages on Amazon's site.
Rating: 
Summary: lots of important stuff
Review: This book contains lots of important topical information on the design and analysis of microarray experiments. It calls attention to a lot of important but sometimes subtle issues that many biologists appear to be overlooking. It appears to be a must-read for researchers who want to avoid expensive dead ends. But it's not perfect...A well-informed computer scientist will recognize that quite a few computational statements are just plain wrong (e.g., p 180,
"[Dendrograms] require the comprehensive precomputation of the dissimilarity measure for all pairs of genes, which grows on the order of N^2" Wrong! Try bucketing. Or p 139, a dissimilarity function based on linear correlation coefficients is "definite". No! If x is a vector and C is a scalar, then clearly x=/=Cx, but d(x,Cx)=0, contrary to the definition of "definite". The "pseudocode" in Chapter 4 is not any clearer than the text, and it is not structured in a way that would allow it to be elaborated into well-engineered code. So rely on this book for big ideas and references, not for details. The book also reinforces my preconception that MIT Press doesn't employ editors... 'way too many typos, for starters. You have to know the basics of molecular biology for this book, and it wouldn't hurt to have a basic understanding of DNA chips as well. It's definitely not the first step for a mathematical scientist hoping to become a bioinformatician. (But why should it be? :c)
Rating: 
Summary: Well written
Review: This is a well written book that gives an overview of the technology of microarrays and their use as investigative tools in functional genomics experiments. I found the technical and analytical descriptions very easy to follow. This is still the only book around that can bring any investigator with little knowledge of molecular biology, data analysis, and/or microarrays up to speed in the field. It is also a good text book for a graduate level course on microarray data analysis.
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