Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Basic Python for Bioinformatics

I've been silent online for the last few months, due to other commitments associated with my day job. But I haven't forgotten all of you in the ether.

Just before I got busy, I wrote a book about basic programming with Python using lots of biological examples. It's been proofed once or twice, but is not quite a beta version, so let's call it the gamma release. I want to push it out now, even it could certainly use some more polish, because it's not clear when I'll get the time to do that.

The target audience is the novice programmer who is interested in biology. However, it differs from most similar material because there are lots of biological and sequence analysis examples, collected from various sources including posts on this site.

Here is a screenshot of the toc for the middle section of the book.

The book is in html format (link to Dropbox zip). It was built using the Sphinx software. One can generate a pdf version of the book as well, but it suffers from the major limitation that cut-and-paste of the code loses the indentation. The version linked to here has code examples that can be pasted directly into a text file and executed, and often will work in the interpreter as well.

I hope you like it. I would be very grateful for comments, criticisms, corrections, and even complaints. Post 'em as comments here, or find my work email through the aboutme. Enjoy!