Wed Jan 30 23:14:52 PST 2002
So after running to a review on O’Reilly’s latest bio book "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" that claimed that it also covered basic organic chem for the programmer types, I figured it was worth a shot. I’m intersted in looking at new problems, and ‘big strange data’ problems like the biology people have seems pretty interesting. So time to take a quick trip to Barnes and Noble to see if they have a copy to look at. Also to see if they have another book on managing open source projects that also sounded interesting to me.
So after poking around in the stacks under ‘programming’ and ‘biology’ and several areas, I give up and go ask where the book is located. Turns out that "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" is under "Web programming" and that "Managing Open Source Projects" is under "Linux". Not exactly what I expected in either case, but that’s starting to be the norm for looking for books at BandN these days. After looking both the books over the both seem to be decent, so a credit card swipe later I’m out a pretty big chunk of change, but with two more books to read. I’ve started in on the bioinformatics book and at least the writing is good and fairly clear. The author did stumble when writing about computability and implied that intractable was the same as NP-complete, and that both were doomed to never be solveable by computers, which is certainly not right. I’ve written programs to solve NP-complete problems, and for that matter, most cryptography relies on some form of asymetric algorithms, sometimes NP-complete ones. Anyway, best not to rant about fairly minor points.
Maybe I’ll read another chapter before I go to sleep. My cat is sleeping on my leg under the covers and moving him isn’t likely to be real easy…