Bioinformatics is an applied science that brings together biology and computer science. In recent times biology has been inundated with information: the human genome alone is around 3200 million base pairs. Today without the aid of computers the creation of DNA sequences and structures, the ability to search and make connections, to store and to predict biological data and models would severely limit the modern day biologist.

The book R Programming for Bioinformatics is written by the lead founder in the ‘Bioconductor’ project, which is a collaborative project to develop extensible software for the field of computational biology and bioinformatics. It is an overview of the fundamentals of programming in R and includes a chapter dedicated to the object-oriented systems employed in R, in particular an overview of the S3 and S4 object-oriented programming systems. The chapters are rich in sections and follow the format of concept description, brief R code and R output demonstration. Although I would not go so far as to call it a programming guide, it did give a greater understanding of the developing software in R. And it provides sufficient information to enable the reader to write well-thought-through code while employing R’s full data manipulation and handling capabilities.

Given the title and the author’s credentials in the field in bioinformatics, it is broader than what they would initially suggest. However, there are some sections directed towards the bioinformatics programming market, including character and pattern manipulation, bioinformatics Web resources and bioinformatics packages including biomaRT and BioBase from the Bioconductor project. It is not a book which is intended to cover statistical methods in R and those commonly used in bioinformatics, or computational algorithms used to match biological data. Overall, it is a well-written and knowledgeable book on aspects of programming in R but it would not be suitable for an end-user.

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