Hacker News Reader

Perl was extremely popular 20+ years ago in biology; I made the jump from the lab bench to bioinformatics with Perl and Bioperl (https://bioperl.org/). But, after a while I discovered Ruby, and later Python, and moved on, also switching to other fields. The presence of Perl and a "proper" terminal on Mac OS X back then was a big draw in encouraging bioinformaticians to use it (well, that is my recollection, anyway).

View on HN

This tickled a memory... I remember seeing a Bioinformatics for Perl book ~20 years ago. I found it on O'reilly's website: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beginning-perl-for/0596...

Searching more I see a Python one appears in 2009: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/bioinformatics-programm...

And now there are several out. Plus expanded topics like Python and Machine Learning, Python and Data Analysis, etc.

That first was a good book - there's still a copy on my shelf in the office, I think, though I've not had chance to go there in person to check recently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com