This book is subtitled as An Introduction to Programming Tools for Life Scientists and this describes well its intent and content. It assumes background knowledge of basic principles in molecular biology and cell biology and access to a computer running a Unix operating system with Perl installed.

The first three substantive chapters deal with some of the basic tools of molecular biology: restriction enzymes, RNAi and PCR. A distinctive feature of the book is the way in which discussion of these concepts is interspersed with practical examples of the use of Perl in addressing relevant problems. Three chapters look at different aspects of human disease while introducing bioinformatic techniques such as BLAST analysis. Examples from evolutionary studies are used to introduce sequencing alignments, molecular phylogeny and bootstrapping. Subsequently, gene function is approached from a consideration of metagenomics and protein domains. An important chapter deals with information resources, including those of the National Centre for Biotechnology Information and European Bioinformatics Institute. Subsequent chapters describe finding genes, with a strong focus on the ‘RNA world’ and finally ‘personal genomes’, single nucleotide polymorphisms and the study of human variation.

Each chapter ends with a small number of exercises and there are four very useful appendices on UNIX, sequence analysis software, Perl and an introduction to R.

The author's stated aim is to convince us that relatively simple programming skills can be used to tackle many common biological problems. He succeeds in this, and both the detail of the book and the attitude it conveys are to be welcomed.