Practical Computing for Biologists

To help with the increasingly large data sets that many scientists deal with, this book illustrates how to use many freely available computing tools to work more powerfully and effectively. The book was born out of the authors' experiences developing tools for their research and to fix other biologist's computational problems. 'For a committed point-and-clicker like myself, Practical Computing for Biologists is a most valuable book. It offers just the right introduction for those less computer savvy biologists who would like to enhance and streamline their ability to handle, process, and analyze data. This book has already made me more confident in confronting the large amounts of data that face me in day-to-day research.' - Ronald Jenner, The Natural History Museum, London, UK 'In this age of informatics and genomics, the ability to mine and manipulate data is an essential skill for graduate students in ecology and evolutionary biology. Practical Computing for Biologists provides a much-needed guide to using Unix and Python to assemble and analyze large data sets. I'm looking forward to using this book as a text to accompany our quantitative bootcamp for new graduate students.' - Michael Alfaro, University of California, Los Angeles, USA