Bioinformatics with R Cookbook Paperback – June 23, 2014

The book BioInformatics with 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.

Good deal

If you are looking for a good intro to bioinformatics and R book, the book that systematically covers important fundamental concepts and broad range of subjects - this book is not for you. If you are looking for a deep and comprehensive R cookbook - this book is also not for you. Sure, you can reproduce the recipes from this book, but it won't give you an understanding of what you are doing: when your cupcakes turn out flat and tasteless you won't know how to fix them or even what went wrong. Don't waste your money and time. Instead, head to free online resources (most of the bioconductor packages have wonderful detailed vignettes).

Superficial information. You can get all this information easily for free.

Very basic introduction of bioinformatics but also the best available at an accessible price. It gives the kick off, then from here is digging the internet for more specialized operations. Anyway is well structured and easy to follow, good for quick reference.

This book is by far the biggest disappointment for this year! The given information is (1) very superficially explained (2) available on the web for free in a deeper context.What I found most aggregating is the lack of accuracy, i.e. typos and missing parameters are very often, that sometime I had to google the functions myself to learn the right form, input, and its task. It seems that nobody did any review before printing.Such a lame and pity for highly exaggerated price!Update:So far, all examples I've tried were outdated, as the services provided by databases changed/deprecated (e.g. Uniprot). Which makes the recipes completely unreproducible and useless especially due to the shallow explanation. This book is completely waste pf money.