[.ca] Microarray Bioinformatics

Book Description:
DNA microarrays have revolutionised molecular biology and are becoming a standard tool in the field. Unlike traditional molecular biology, the successful use of DNA microarrays requires a substantial use of statistics and computing, to design the arrays, design the experiments, and to analyze and manage the data. This book is written for researchers, clinicians, laboratory heads and managers, from both laboratory and bioinformatics backgrounds, who work, or intend to work with microarrays. It is a comprehensive guide to the mathematics, statistics and computing required to use microarrays successfully.

If you are new to microarray, get this book.:
This book describes basic concepts and procedures for those who are new to microarray. I'd recommend that a reader should use this book to grasp what microarray is. You won't be able to know anything in depth from this book but it will be nice to have this if you have trouble in understanding a more challenging book. Once you read this book, please go ahead and read another book since this book doesn't tell you everything about microarray. It's just a basic overview... i was glad that I used this book as my first microarray textbook....

an intro. for biologists:
This book is written clearly, which also means it doesn't touch too deep. I believe it's mainly useful for biologists who want to get a brief and application oriented introduction, but not for the researchers that want to improve the technology.

Neat little book on microarrays:
Without question this short paperback is a nifty little text. What it does is provide the beginner with a basic brief overview in covering all major aspects of microarrays. What you have to keep in mind is this book is intended for those who want a brief overview of all aspects of microarrays. Its a "forest for the trees" book on microarrays. The writing is very good and easy to follow, and its a great introductory text and reasonably priced. Regardless of ones formal training, (e.g. Biology, Statistics, Computer Science, ... , health science) I think it would make an excellent little basic reference on ones bookshelf or to just have around in the lab for undergraduates/beginning graduate students. Bottomline: If you prefer to learn things by starting at the start and not at the end then consider this book; Indeed its a great starter book to get your feet a little wet before jumping in over your head to the more gnarly stuff.

Mildly disappointing:
I'm not a biologist but became curious about the microarray technology. Although the book seems to cover the important aspects (as far as I can tell from browsing), it managed to annoy me. The author did not make effort to provide something very basic like a clear vocabulary. Example: he starts using "spot" and "feature" without making effort to explain what they mean in the context of microarrays. At times it seems he treats them as synonyms which is confusing. I consulted the index hoping to find somewhere precise definition of these terms but to no avail. At the end, I had to go to Wikipedia and various other pages which did the job but then if you have to use internet to understand the book than why not just get everything from the web and save the money for the book? Noting that the target audience are novices in the area of microarrays (experts won't find anything valuable here), the book does a poor job of serving them. To recap: "Nice try. Could do better"

Great Introduction to Microarray Analysis:
This is an excellent introduction to microarray analysis. It is great at explaining the theory behind normalization, clustering, and dimensionality reduction without getting hung up on the statistics behind it. If you are looking for an exhaustive statistical treatment on the topic, this is not the book. But it will give you excellent background on these techniques that make reading statistical papers on the topic much easier for the non-statistics biologist. Highly recommended.