Last week I made a 5 book order at Amazon and one of them was Bioinformatics Programming Using Python: Practical Programming for Biological Data (Animal Guide) by Mitchell L Model.

I started reading the book late Friday night, and I’m on the third chapter, where there’s an introduction to sequences. So far, I found the book very confusing, especially as it claims to be a book for people with no programming background. The examples are OK, but there’s a very messy mixture of Python interpreter and standalone script usage, as the author jumps back and forth them. Another thing is that some examples are explained in detail including the line number, while others you depend on the code’s docstring to understand it.

So far, I’m not impressed. The initial Python sequence example is a set and in this chapter there already are some functional programming concepts, what can be quite challenging to someone that has never programmed in their life. And in the second chapter the reader sees a ternary operator. Another criticism, is that in the preface the author suggests using Python 3, instead of 2, what might add to the frustration of the beginner when a module cannot be installed.

I will continue reading it and post whenever I have a more complete overview of the book.