Glad you’re interested in the book, here’s the chapters and a very quick description of the content…

1: Introduction

General introduction to the topic of bioinformatics and setting out what we hope to achieve with the book – to get you on your way to using existing and creating your own bioinformatics tools.

2: Building Biological Databases with MySQL

An introduction to the principles of relational databases, and database design. Also covers the details of getting started and working with MySQL – installing, creating users/databases/tables and querying.

3: Automating Processes Using Perl

An introduction to the basics of programming and the Perl programming language, quickly moving on to more intermediate topics and giving you pointers of where to go next on your programming journey. This is the largest chapter in the book, and goes into quite some detail.

4: Numerical data analysis using R

An introduction to the statistical programming language/environment R. This takes you through the basics and quickly moves onto how you would use R to analyse large multi-variate datasets. This chapter also covers drawing plots and diagrams with R.

5: Programming for the Web

Building on the content from the previous three chapters, we introduce you to the world of web programming – the basics of HTML, CSS and how to setup a web server (apache). From here we show you how to create dynamic web pages using Perl to extract data from a database, (using user controlled forms), and show it on a webpage in both tabular and graphic (using Perl and R based graphs) form.

I hope this helps!

I’m interested in buying the book but I can’t seem to find a list of covered chapters or topics (in any detail) anywhere.

If it’s out there but I just haven’t found it please direct me to it!

I think its what I need, but don’t want to buy blind.

regards! =)