Re:Should I go into Bioinformatics? (Score 2, Interesting)

I'm a 21-year-old CS student that just applied for a double major in Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB), getting into computational biology, and I will say that knowledge of molecular and genetics biology is a must. The people here at Berkeley know their introns and promoters and amino acid interactions, along with (what seems to be) a foundation in statistics and probability. They're juggling enormous data sets to figure out, "What's the probability that alanine is in this protein family?" And sometimes I feel lost, since I don't have a solid background in genetics.

Most of the books you describe (stuff like O'Reilly's "Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics") are geared towards life scientists who aren't computer-savvy or haven't programmed before. They won't go into the background needed to understand the real principles: chemistry, biology, biochemistry and genetics.

If you're interested in getting into bioinformatics (which I really believe is possible for you to do, since you've done CS, math, and physics, so you have at least the technical part down) you can read some textbooks in your spare time. :) I find that textbooks are geared towards teaching, than grim black-and-white technical books and papers on the subject. Skim the text first to gain some familiarity, so that you aren't bogged down with nitty-gritty details.

• Biology by Campbell ~ just read the genetics part of the text
• Lehninger's Principles of Biochemistry by Nelson and Cox has a few sections in the back on genetics metabolism
• Bioinformatics by David Mount. I heard this one was good, but you should read the previous books first :)

Good luck!