This is an excellent introduction to this up-and-coming field. Bioinformatics one of many fields that is inherently inter-disciplinary, with biologists coming in and needing to learn computer science, and computer scientists coming in and needing to learn biology. I think that the book is very useful for both groups. I have a computer science background and 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 topics in bioinformatics, and 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 and computer programming, biological classification and nomenclature, phylogenetic relationships and use of sequences, PSI-BLAST, and protein structure.
Chapter 2 Genome organization and evolution: genomics and proteomics, methods of genetic information transmission, genes and genomes, SNPs, genome evolution.
Chapter 3 Archives and information retrieval: this contains a detailed discussion of various databases and how to interact with them.
Chapter 4 Alignments and phylogenetic trees: this vast majority of this chapter covers many aspects of the important area of sequence alignment, including BLAST and HMMs. Then it has short sections on phylogeny and phylogenetic trees, again covering the basics.
Chapter 5 Protein structure and drug discovery: this starts with protein folding, and deals with hydrophobicity, structural alignments, DALI, and then evolution, classification and prediction of protein structures and function. Finally it touches on drug discovery in this context.
One of the nice things about this book is the code samples, written in the bioinformatician's favorite language, Perl. These are printed and discussed in the book, but then also available on the web site that is associated with the book, so you don't have to type it in 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 that in a book!). It also has the web links mentioned in the book, so you can explore them more conveniently than having to flip through the book and type the URLs in.
