With its highly developed capacity to detect patterns in data, Perlhas become one of the most popular languages for biological dataanalysis. But if you're a biologist with little or no programmingexperience, starting out in Perl can be a challenge. Manybiologists have a difficult time learning how to apply the languageto bioinformatics. The most popular Perl programming books areoften too theoretical and too focused on computer science for anon-programming biologist who needs to solve very specificproblems. Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics is designed toget you quickly over the Perl language barrier by approachingprogramming as an important new laboratory skill, revealing Perlprograms and techniques that are immediately useful in the lab.Each chapter focuses on solving a particular bioinformatics problemor class of problems, starting with the simplest and increasing incomplexity as the book progresses. Each chapter includesprogramming exercises and teaches bioinformatics by showing andmodifying programs that deal with various kinds of practicalbiological problems. By the end of the book you'll have a solidunderstanding of Perl basics, a collection of programs for suchtasks as parsing BLAST and GenBank, and the skills to take on moreadvanced bioinformatics programming. Some of the later chaptersfocus in greater detail on specific bioinformatics topics. Thisbook is suitable for use as a classroom textbook, for self-study,and as a reference. The book covers:
Programming basics and working with DNA sequencesand strings
Debugging your code
Simulating gene mutations using random numbergenerators
Regular expressions and finding motifs in data
Arrays, hashes, and relational databases
Regular expressions and restriction maps
Using Perl to parse PDB records, annotations inGenBank, and BLAST output