[Biopython-announce] ANN: Python for Bioinformatics book

[Peter Cock]

Hi all,

Congratulations to Sebastian on his new book's release!
See below...

Peter

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sebastian Bassi <sbassi at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 7:15 PM
Subject: [Biopython] ANN: Python for Bioinformatics book
To: Biopython List <biopython at lists.open-bio.org>


Just want to announce the availability of the book "Python for
Bioinformatics". It has a Biopython chapter and I made it thanks to
lot of people of this list (and biopython-dev) who help me since I
began programming Python about 7 years ago.

Here is the official announce:

"Python for Bioinformatics"
ISBN 1584889292
Amazon: http://www.tinyurl.com/biopython
Publisher: http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781584889298

This book introduces programming concepts to life science researchers,
bioinformaticians, support staff, students, and everyone who is
interested in applying programming to solve biologically-related
problems. Python is the chosen programming language for this task
because it is both powerful and easy-to-use.

It begins with the basic aspects of the language (like data types and
control structures) up to essential skills on today's bioinformatics
tasks like building web applications, using relational database
management systems, XML and version control. There is a chapter
devoted to Biopython (www.biopython.org) since it can be used for most
of the tasks related to bioinformatics data processing.

There is a section with applications with source code, featuring
sequence manipulation, filtering vector contamination, calculating DNA
melting temperature, parsing a genbank file, inferring splicing sites,
and more.

There are questions at the end of every chapter and odd numbered
questiona are answered in an appendix making this text suitable for
classroom use.

This book can be used also as a reference material as it includes
Richard Gruet's Python Quick Reference, and the Python Style Guide.

DVD: The included DVD features a virtual machine with a special
edition of DNALinux, with all the programs and complementary files
required to run the scripts commented in the book. All scripts can be
tweaked to fit a particular configuration. By using a pre-configured
virtual machine the reader has access to the same development
environment than the author, so he can focus on learning Python. All
code is also available at the http://py3.us/## where ## is the code
number, for example: http://py3.us/57

I've been working on this book for more than two years testing the
examples under different setups and working to make the code
compatible for most versions of Python, Biopython and operating
systems. Where there is code that only works with a particular
dependency, this is clearly noted.

Finally, I want to highlight that non-bioinformaticians out there can
use this book as an introduction to bioinformatics by starting with
the included "Diving into the Gene Pool with BioPython" (by Zachary
Voase and published originally in Python Magazine).
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