A Computer Scientist's Guide to Cell Biology

A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology provides a "reading knowledge" of biology to those coming into the field from the perspective of computer science-particularly from the areas of information retrieval and/or machine learning.

The text explores three different facets of biology: biological systems, experimental methods, and language and nomenclature. The author discusses what biologists are trying to determine from their experiments, how various experimental procedures are used and how they relate to accepted concepts in computer science, and the vocabulary necessary to read and understand current literature in biology.

Researchers, professionals and computer science students will find this an invaluable reference tool and an excellent starting point for a more comprehensive examination of cell biology.

• bioinformatics
• biology
• complexity
• gene expression
• genes
• learning
• machine learning
• molecular biology
• molecular mechanisms
• programming
• tools

From the reviews:

"This concise book is an excellent introduction for computer scientists to the exciting revolution under way in molecular biology. It provides lucid, high-level descriptions of the fundamental molecular mechanisms of life, and discusses the computational principles involved. I wish this little gem was available when I was 'learning the ropes' -- it would have been my first choice of reading material."

--Roni Rosenfeld, Carnegie Mellon University

"Cell biology is certainly a new and exciting area. This nice, compact, and enthusiastically written book covers a huge amount of material. The author describes biological systems, experimental methods, and the language of cell biology. … Summing up, this book (with its excellent index) can be used as one of the first steps in obtaining a reading knowledge of biology -- though cautiously." (H. I. Kilov, Computing Reviews, December, 2007)

• Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

  William W. Cohen

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