Part I Whetting your Appetite: Introduction.- Part II Computer and Operating Systems: Unix/Linux.- Part III: Working with Unix/Linux: The First Touch.- Working with Files.- Installing BLAST and ClustalW.- Working with Text.- Using the Shell.- Shell Programming.-Regular Expressions.- Sed.- Part IV Programming: Awk.- Perl.- Appendix.- Solutions.- References.- Index

This book is a practical introduction into Unix/Linux and its programming to biologists as well as to chemists and physicists who work in bioinformatics and biophysics. The goal is to learn about the power of the stream editor 'sed' and the programming languages 'awk' and 'perl' in order to extract or format information from various sources. It is written for beginners with no computational but biological background. Basic programming constructs are introduced and applied. With this book, the reader will be able to work in the Unix environment (BSD; Linux, MacOSX) and to write programs in order to format and analyse large data files.