Culled from here
Joel Dudley, co-founder of MacResearch and a student in the Stanford Biomedical Informatics program, gave a quick seminar today on how to program effectively for bioinformatics. The main point is that to be a good bioinformatician, you need to build up your toolbox, be aware of what’s out there, and use and integrate existing tools to do more powerful work. To do this, he gives the following suggestions:
- Learn UNIX. It’s quick, it’s powerful, it’s easy to learn. What often takes several lines to code in a scripting language can usually be reduced to a single line on the command line.
- Be jack of all trades, but master of ONE. That is, be familiar with most programming languages, but be really good at one of them. In the hierarchy of languages, VB and C are more “primitive” while Ruby and Python are most “advanced” – he recommends starting with one of the more a