Perl for Exploring DNA

The book presents a hands-on introductory guide to DNA sequence analysis. This can be depicted as a linear map of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts; however, such a map only hints at the varied contours and crevices, twists, kinks, loops, and nodes of the extraordinary double helix. The book uncovers why Perl is the language of choice when identifying patterns in strings of text. It offers a simplified approach to programming that is applicable to biological sequence analysis, especially geared to those who do not have prior programming experience. Concepts include good programming practices, creative...

The book presents a hands-on introductory guide to DNA sequence analysis. This can be depicted as a linear map of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts; however, such a map only hints at the varied contours and crevices, twists, kinks, loops, and nodes of the extraordinary double helix. The book uncovers why Perl is the language of choice when identifying patterns in strings of text. It offers a simplified approach to programming that is applicable to biological sequence analysis, especially geared to those who do not have prior programming experience. Concepts include good programming practices, creative approaches to teaching and working with strings and files of sequence data, and sequence related applications of regular expressions, control structures, arrays, and hash tables. A linguistic metaphor is used throughout the text to complement an exceptionally friendly and pedagogically sound introduction to sequence analysis via Perl programming.