Ch. 1. Preface -- pt. 1. Earth -- Ch. 2. A Classification of Programming Languages -- Ch. 3. [actual symbol not reproducible] Propedentics -- Ch. 4. Getting the Materials -- Ch. 5. Variables, Data Types, and Assignments -- Ch. 6. Flow Control -- Ch. 7. [actual symbol not reproducible] Application: Full Impact -- Ch. 8. Functions and Procedures -- Ch. 9. Application: Your Most Expensive Pocket Calculator -- Ch. 10. The Object-oriented World -- Ch. 11. [actual symbol not reproducible] Exercise: Prime Numbers -- Ch. 12. The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Rivalling Strategies -- Ch. 13. Ordo Ab Chao: Sorting and Searching -- Ch. 14. Welcome to the Library -- pt. 2. Water -- Ch. 15. [actual symbol not reproducible] A Very Short Project: Trithemizing a File -- Ch. 16. Some Thoughts on Compression and Checksums -- Ch. 17. Dealing with Errors -- Ch. 18. [actual symbol not reproducible] A Real-life Project: Generating a Restriction Map and Making Simple Predictions -- Ch. 19. Advanced Techniques in Python -- Ch. 20. [actual symbol not reproducible] The Third Project: Python goes PCR -- Ch. 21. The Wizard's Sabbath: A Gathering of Languages -- Ch. 22. Facing up to Python-3000 -- Ch. 23. Anna will Return.

This first introductory book designed to train novice programmers is based on a student course taught by the author, and has been optimized for biology students without previous experience in programming. By interspersing theory chapters with numerous small and large programming exercises, the author quickly shows readers how to do their own programming, and throughout uses anecdotes and real-life examples from the biosciences to 'spice up' the text. This practical book thus teaches essential programming skills for life scientists who want -- or need -- to write their own bioinformatics software tools.