Bioinformatics Data Skills: Reproducible and Robust Research with Open Source Tools 1st Edition

It's one of the most readable books in bioinformatics. It's concise and has a nice balance of range vs. depth.The author is very adept at leading the audience into a topic in a step-by-step fashion, probably due to his experience in interacting with people who want to get into bioinformatics but only have very limited knowledge of unix and programing. For instance, although he pointed out that SQL was beyond the scope of this book, he nonetheless introduced a series of sqlite operations that should suffice for most research projects except those aiming at providing complex database for large group.Highly recommended for scientists with background in biology but want to get into data analysis.

I definitely recommend this book. I've started doing more bioinformatics at work. This chapters on unix tools and remote machines were directly applicable to the work I do, and they're mostly arranged in the order you would need them in. I also quite appreciate his editorializing on how to set up directory structures for more reproducible research.The negative I would say is that I've had trouble motivating myself to go through the middle third of the book ("Introduction to R" and "Range Data") chapters. While proper programmers can and do float easily among languages, and I strongly appreciate the Unix chapters, it feels like people fall more into R or Python camps, and while I could be wrong, I don't feel like I should really need to add R at this time.

This book contains a lot of tidbits of info I wish I knew when I started learning bioinformatics. I wouldn't really say it's a cookbook that'll take you through your analysis step by step, nor is it for beginners; but it teaches practical knowledge and good data analysis and record keeping practices. It's a little densely written, and definitely not a primary resource, but a good reference nonetheless.

Such a well written and easy to follow book for bioinformaticians with low-intermediate programming knowledge. I recommend this book to all of my mentees.

The content of this book is very broad and seemingly unrelated to each other. It covers basic command line, git, R and some commonly used software such as samtools and bcftools. It also teaches important working concept of bioinfo, such as reproducible research.

It introduce all the skills needed to work on the state of art NGS data, and present the skills in a very readable way.

I feel strongly obligated to commend this book. This is a wonderful compendium that helps those who already know a bit of Python/R languages to quickly pick up speed in dealing with next-gen sequencing data. Many of the practical tips are not easily available elsewhere. Some potential buyers may be distanced noticing the fact that the author is a new graduate student in population genetics. Please don't worry. The author is also a senior bioinformatician who is so generously sharing his truly practical insights and skills with NGS data. Fresh and up-to-date! On the other hand, it's only fair to note this book is not for those who are truly beginners to bioinformatics, especially those without any Linux/Python/R skills.

The book is a gem. The clear and unambiguous description of technical details sets it apart from many similar volumes. The author's wise advice on good practice could save many a researcher time and trouble in the long run.