Author: Martin Gardner File Type: pdf Martin Gardner continues to delight readers in Origami, Eleusis, and the Soma Cube, which is the second volume in the new Cambridge series, The New Martin Gardner Mathematical Library, based off his enormously popular Scientific American columns. He introduces young and old readers alike to the Generalized Ham Sandwich Theorem, origami, digital roots, magic squares, the mathematics of cooling coffee, the induction game of Eleusis, Dudeney puzzles, the maze at Hampton Court Palace, and many more mathematical puzzles and principles. Now the author, in consultation with experts, has added updates to all the chapters, including new game variations, mathematical proofs, and other developments and discoveries, to challenge and fascinate a new generation of readers.

Author: James Tisdall File Type: pdf With its highly developed capacity to detect patterns in data, Perl has become one of the most popular languages for biological data analysis. But if youre a biologist with little or no programming experience, starting out in Perl can be a challenge. Many biologists have a difficult time learning how to apply the language to bioinformatics. The most popular Perl programming books are often too theoretical and too focused on computer science for a non-programming biologist who needs to solve very specific problems.Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics is designed to get you quickly over the Perl language barrier by approaching programming as an important new laboratory skill, revealing Perl programs and techniques that are immediately useful in the lab. Each chapter focuses on solving a particular bioinformatics problem or class of problems, starting with the simplest and increasing in complexity as the book progresses. Each chapter includes programming exercises and teaches bioinformatics by showing and modifying programs that deal with various kinds of practical biological problems. By the end of the book youll have a solid understanding of Perl basics, a collection of programs for such tasks as parsing BLAST and GenBank, and the skills to take on more advanced bioinformatics programming. Some of the later chapters focus in greater detail on specific bioinformatics topics. This book is suitable for use as a classroom textbook, for self-study, and as a reference.The book coversullProgramming basics and working with DNA sequences and strings llDebugging your codellSimulating gene mutations using random number generatorsllRegular expressions and finding motifs in datallArrays, hashes, and relational databasesllRegular expressions and restriction mapsllUsing Perl to parse PDB records, annotations in GenBank, and BLAST outputlulAmazon.com ReviewBiology, it seems, is a good showcase for the talents of Perl. Newcomers to Perl who understand biological information will find James Tisdalls Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics to be an excellent compendium of examples. Teachers of Perl will likewise find the text to be filled with fresh programming illustrations of growing scientific importance. Seasoned Perlmongers who want to learn biology, however, should search elsewhere, as Tisdalls emphasis is on Perls logic rather than Mother Natures.Departing from OReillys earlier monograph Developing Bioinformatic Computer Skills, Tisdalls text is organized aggressively along didactic lines. Nearly all of the 13 chapters begin with twin bullet lists of Perl programming tools and the bioinformatic methods that require them. Likewise, the chapters end with exercises. String concatenation is illustrated with gene splicing, and regular expressions are taught with gene transcription and motif searching.Tisdall emphasizes sequence examples throughout, leading up to an introduction to a Perl interface for the NIH GenBank biological database and the widely used BLAST sequence alignment tool. After a brief discussion of three-dimensional protein structure, he returns to sequence extraction and secondary structure prediction.Tisdalls goal is to boost the beginning programmer into a domain of self-learning. He imparts essential etiquette for the success of programming newbies use the wealth or resources available, from user documentation to Web site surveys to FAQs to How-Tos to news groups and finally to direct personal appeals for help from a senior colleague. A well-plugged-in bioinformatics Perl student will soon discover Bioperl, an open-source effort to bring research-grade bioinformatic tools to the Perl community. Bioperl is described briefly at the end of Tisdalls book and will reportedly be a forthcoming title of its own in the OReilly bioinformatics series.Although he introduces bioinformatics as an academic discipline, Tisdall treats it as a trade throughout his book. He indicates that open questions and computational hard problems exist, but does not describe what they are or how they are being tackled. Ultimately, Tisdall presents bioinformatics as another arrow in a bench scientists quiver, very much like HPLC, 2D-PAGE, and the various spectroscopies.As odd as a bioinformatics-as-tool book may be to its research proponents, the reduction of bioinformatics to trade status both deflates and vindicates the years of research, as Tisdalls work attests. --Peter LeopoldAbout the AuthorJames Tisdall has worked as a musician, a programmer at Bell Labs (where he programmed for speech research and discovered a formal language for musical rhythm), and as a bioinformaticist at Mercator Genetics in Menlo Park, California, and at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. He has a B.A. in mathematics from the City College of New York and an M.S. in computer science from Columbia University he is working towards a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. In his spare time, Jim teaches computer music at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia. He is also the author of OReillys Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics.