This book is designed to be a concrete, digestible introduction to the area that has
come to be known as “bioinformatics” or “computational molecular biology”. My
own teaching in this area has been directed toward a mixture of graduate and advanced
undergraduate students in computer science and graduate students from the
biological sciences, including biomathematics, genetics, forestry, and entomology.
Although a number of books on this subject have appeared in the recent past – and
one or two are quite well written – I have found none to be especially suitable for the
widely varying backgrounds of this audience.
My experience with this audience has led me to conclude that its needs can be
met effectively by a book with the following features.