Ask HN: What are the best bioinformatics books you've read? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the best bioinformatics books you've read?

23 pointsmojoe7 comments

I got a biochemistry degree 12 years ago but have been writing software outside the field ever since. I'm curious about what the state of the art in bioinformatics is these days -- if there are any experts here I'd be grateful for some interesting resources!

View on HN

I'm far from claiming expertise in the field. But I'd start with the UCSD Bioinformatics Specialization course

https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics

The Biostar Handbook and BioPython library also have active communities for self learners

https://www.biostarhandbook.com/

http://biopython.org/DIST/docs/tutorial/Tutorial.html

Best of luck ;)

thanks, great resources!

Yea, if you are looking to get up to date. I'd start with maybe a semi-recent reference book. But after that it's going to be all papers.

This looks decent: https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Bioinformatics-Introductio...

Wouldn't use books (just read papers, I liked Bioinformatics back in the day but it's a bit too math-y, generally the quality is there though). Do you mean genomics or some of the other subdomains of bioinformatics? Do you mean more for human health or ecology applications?

On a semi related note I got a biochemistry degree 10 years ago and have been writing software outside the field ever since. My partner still is in genomics so I do somewhat keep up but I definitely still love biochemistry and miss keeping up with it. So, uh, do you think you'd like to talk to someone about your projects or share good papers or something?

I'm interested in modeling biochemical systems -- a lot of work falls under this umbrella. Thanks for the offer of chatting about this stuff, if you're still interested my email address is joe@compellingpython.com

This is a book I loved: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783642072857

I only know of 2 that deserve the term bioinformatics, which is really abused when data wrangling should be used in place.

Those are Durbin et al 1998 and Pevzner et al 2000.

Durbin et al is a classic on HMMs, but some sections feel incomplete.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com