Book review: Eidhammer I, Janassen I and Taylor WR 2004: Protein Bioinformatics: an algorithmic approach to sequence and structure analysis. Chichester, Wiley. 355 pp. $85 (HB), ISBN 0-470-84839-1
Abstract
RosemaryTate Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK Protein Bioinformatics is based on Informatics courses taught at the University of Bergen, and is intended as a textbook and reference book for molecular biologists and computer scientists who wish to have a greater understanding of the pro- grams and algorithms `that are used to tackle the central problems in molecular biology'. It has three parts: (1) sequence analysis, (2) structure analysis and (3) sequence–structure analysis. Each section consists of a short explanation of the method followed by a series of detailed algorithms and examples for each type of analysis. The rst section includes a short chapter on statistical methods. As a statistician and computer scientist with an enthusiasm for dynamic programming, I was hoping that this book would increase my very rudi- mentary understanding and knowledge of bioin- formatics. I was disappointed. My main criticism of this book is that the basic principles and moti- vations for using the various methods are mostly very brief and not properly explained. For example, a single line is devoted to explaining and de n- ing dynamic programming, an approach used in most of the algorithms in this book, with no ref- erence to Richard