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Saturday, August 9, 2014

Book Review: Bioinformatics with R Cookbook



The book BioInformaticswith R Cookbook is a 340 pages book published by PACKT publishing last June. The book is intended for individuals working on the areas of biology and genetics. Most of the techniques and type of analysis (i.e. sequence, protein structure, microarray, etc.) discussed in the book are tailored for practitioners handling genomics data. A typical cookbook style material, the focus of the book is on how to implement the above mentioned techniques using R. The book also tackles procedure on how to connect with genomics databases such as Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and Gene Ontology as through the Bioconductor platform.  It also tackles access some cloud base implementation of R. The structure of the discussion is very helpful and easy to follow. The How to Do it, How it works, and There’s more.. sequence of discussion provides readers a good guide and grasp on the techniques that are being discussed.
On the other hand, the book is somehow lacking in the discussion of the basics of R software (i.e. intro to the language and data type). The book assumes that the readers have already acquired these basic know how about the language.
Overall, the book is a good reference material especially for individuals dealing with data on biology and genomics.