Working on the assumption that the reader has no formal training in programming, Perl Programming for Biologists demonstrates how Perl is used to solve biological problems. Each chapter opens with a set of learning objectives, provides numerous review questions and self-study exercises, and concludes with a bulleted summary of key points. The author incorporates numerous real-life examples throughout the text.
Upon completing the book, readers are able to quickly perform such tasks as correcting recurring errors in spreadsheets, scanning a Fasta sequence for every occurrence of an EcoRI site, adapting other writers' scripts to one's own purposes, and most important, writing reusable and maintainable scripts that spare the rote repetition of code.

Contents

• Part I: The Basics
  • Introduction.
  • Chapter 1. An Introduction to Perl.
  • Chapter 2. Variables and Data Types.
  • Chapter 3. Arrays and Hashes.
  • Chapter 4. Control Structures.
• Part II: Intermediate PERL.
  • Chapter 5. Subroutines.
  • Chapter 6. String Manipulation.
  • Chapter 7. Input and Output.
  • Chapter 8. Perl Modules and Packages.
• Part III: Advanced PERL.
  • Chapter 9. References.
  • Chapter 10. Object-Oriented Programming.
  • Chapter 11. Bioperl.

• Appendix A. Partial Perl Reference.
• Appendix B. Bioinformatics File Formats.