Working on the assumption that the reader has no formal training in programming, Perl Programming for Biologists demonstrates how Perl is used to solve biological problems. Each chapter opens with a set of learning objectives, provides numerous review questions and self-study exercises, and concludes with a bulleted summary of key points. The author incorporates numerous real-life examples throughout the text. Upon completing the book, readers are able to quickly perform such tasks as correcting recurring errors in spreadsheets, scanning a Fasta sequence for every occurrence of an EcoRI site, adapting other writers' scripts to one's own purposes, and most important, writing reusable and maintainable scripts that spare the rote repetition of code.

Curtis Jamison received his B.A. (Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology) from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1985, and his Ph.D. (Biological Sciences) from the University of Denver in 1991. He held an NSF CISE postdoctoral fellowship while at National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where he received a patent for his work on distributed application gateways and database federation. Dr. Jamison continued his work on database federation with plant genome databases for the USDA Agricultural Genome Information Service, and then later evolved to work on higher organisms at the National Institutes of Health where he created computational tools for genome mapping for the Human Genome Project. He is currently an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics at George Mason University, and is director of the Bioinformatics Ph.D. program.