[Tutor] Biology and introductory programming?

[Pijus Virketis]

>Just out of curiosity, how many of us here have an interest in
>"bioinformatics"?  I've just bought the book "Beginning Perl for
>Bioinformatics", and it appears to be an introductory test for biologists
>who are trying to smash their brains against Perl.  *grin*

Thanks for the book reference. I'll pass it along to all the tentative
programmers/biologists here.:) Over the past year, I have been writting far
more biology-related code than I bargained for ... :) I am an economics
student myself, so alot of the underlying heuristics was foreign to me. The
stuff that people (my grad student friends, mostly) around here are
interested in is actually not pure molecular biology per se, but its
applications: tree phylogeny, Bayseian inference for dating splits in plant
species and such. Mac is (was?) the platform of choice before, but now a
lot of bio people are learning Unix/Solaris/Linux and getting into
computational science. I try to tout Python as the first language par
excellence.:)

Cheers,

Pijus
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