Books and Materials about Bioinformatics

This is a list of books that I would suggest for those who want to learn about Bioinformatics coming from a biology, computer science, or mathematics background. This is under construction – I’ll add more books and materials and more detailed descriptions as time goes by.

Disclaimer: this list is my personal (and somewhat biased) list that may not work for everyone. This list is particularly intended for students engaged in independent study.

For those with a biology background, I think that the ability to write code is essential. Thus, I’d like to recommend the following programming and algorithm books. For a programming language, I recommend C++. Once you’re familiar with C++, I think that in one day you can easily learn other programming languages such as Python, Java, and even R.

(1) Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup

(2) Fundamentals of Data Structures in C++ by Ellis Horowitz, Sartaj Sahni, and Dinesh Mehta
https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Data-Structures-Ellis-Horowitz/dp/0929306376/ref=sr_1_1?crid=CBQ9JLMCGR4M&keywords=fundamentals+of+data+structures+in+c%2B%2B&qid=1563888443&s=gateway&sprefix=Fundamentals+of+data+structure%2Caps%2C144&sr=8-1

For those with a computer science, mathematics, or engineering background, I’d like to recommend the following books.

(1) Molecular Biology of the Cell by Bruce Alberts, Alexander D. Johnson, Julian Lewis, David Morgan, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, and Peter Walter

On top of that, I’d like to recommend online courses such as Coursera and MIT OpenCourseWare.

If you are interested in understanding human biology, then I found the following books helpful.

(1) Robins and Cotran Pathologic Basis of Disease

If you are interested in improving your programming skills substantially, then I’d like to recommend that you take a close look at some well written source code. I know that it will take a lot of effort and time for you to understand code written by others, but it should be worth your devotion. Assuming that you master many advanced programming techniques used in the recommended code, who knows, you may end up working at Google getting paid half a million dollars!

Here’s a list of source codes.