Preface to the First Edition

This little book attempts to give a self-contained account of bioinformatics, so that the

newcomer to the field may, whatever his point of departure, gain a rather complete

overview. At the same time it makes no claim to be comprehensive: The field is

already too vast—and let it be remembered that although its recognition as a distinct

discipline (i.e., one after which departments and university chairs are named) is

recent, its roots go back a long time.

Given that many of the newcomers arrive from either biology or informatics, it was

an obvious consideration that for the book to achieve its aim of completeness, large

portions would have to deal with matter already known to those with backgrounds

in either of those two fields; that is, in the particular chapters dealing with them,

the book would provide no information for them. Since such chapters could hardly

be omitted, I have tried to consider such matter in the light of bioinformatics as a

whole, so that even the student ostensibly familiar with it could benefit from a fresh

viewpoint.

In one regard especially, this book cannot be comprehensive. The field is devel-

oping extraordinarily rapidly and it would have been artificial and arbitrary to take

a snapshot of the details of contemporary research. Hence I have tried to focus on

a thorough grounding of concepts, which will enable the student not only to under-

stand contemporary work but should also serve as a springboard for his or her own

discoveries. Much of the raw material of bioinformatics is open and accessible to all

via the internet, powerful computing facilities are ubiquitous, and we may be confi-

dent that vast tracts of the field lie yet uncultivated. This accessibility extends to the

literature: Research papers on any topic can usually be found rapidly by an internet

search and, therefore, I have not aimed at providing a comprehensive bibliography.

In bioinformatics, so much is to be done, the raw material to hand is already so

vast and vastly increasing, and the problems to be solved are so important (perhaps

the most important of any science at present), we may be entering an era comparable

to the great flowering of quantum mechanics in the first three decades of the twentieth

century, during which there were periods when practically every doctoral thesis was

a major breakthrough. If this book is able to inspire the student to take up some of

the challenges, then it will have accomplished a large part of what it sets out to do.

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