Address of the bookmark: http://www.rdatamining.com/

Yet, for many students, biologists, and even computer scientists, the question is: “Where do I begin?” With so many platforms, books, and tutorials available, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

To make it easier, I’ve compiled 10 excellent resources — ranging from beginner-friendly introductions to advanced computational genomics courses. Many of these are freely available, created by pioneers in the field, and widely used in classrooms and research labs worldwide.

Whether you are a complete beginner or looking to strengthen your foundations, these courses will help you build the skills needed to analyze biological data, design workflows, and think computationally about complex biological systems.

1. HarvardX Data Analysis for Genomics by Rafael Irizarry

From the almighty Rafa, this set of online courses (via edX/HarvardX) is a classic starting point for genomic data science and bioinformatics.

2. Applied Computational Genomics – Aaron Quinlan

Aaron Quinlan (creator of bedtools and many other tools) has made his course materials open. A practical, tool-driven genomics introduction.

3. Bioinformatics Algorithms (Coursera + Companion Book)

Find the highly visual video classes on Coursera, backed by the popular Bioinformatics Algorithms book.

4. The Biostar Handbook

Not a course per se, but a hands-on manual by Istvan (founder of Biostars.org) that’s even used in classes at Penn State.

5. Introduction to Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (by Shirley Liu)

A comprehensive introduction from Shirley Liu’s lab (Harvard DFCI). Covers both theory and computational practice.

6. Data Carpentry: Genomics Workshops

Community-driven training workshops that focus on practical, reproducible research. I was honored to serve as curriculum committee chair here.

7. Computational Genomics: Applied Comparative Genomics

From the Schatz Lab — applied comparative genomics with real-world data.

8. Introduction to Computational Biology (Mike Love, creator of DESeq2)

This course bridges statistics, biology, and computation — a solid primer for anyone entering computational biology.

9. MIT Computational Biology (6.047 / 6.878 / HST.507) by Manolis Kellis

Covers genomes, networks, evolution, and health. A deep-dive from MIT’s OpenCourseWare archive.

10. An Introduction to Applied Bioinformatics

An interactive textbook with Python code, designed for practical applied bioinformatics learning.

Awk is a programming language that is specifically designed for quickly manipulating space delimited data. Although you can achieve all its functionality with Perl, awk is simpler in many practical cases.

Why awk? You can replace a pipeline of 'stuff | grep | sed | cut...' with a single call to awk. For a simple script, most of the timelag is in loading these apps into memory, and it's much faster to do it all with one. This is ideal for something like an openbox pipe menu where you want to generate something on the fly. You can use awk to make a neat one-liner for some quick job in the terminal, or build an awk section into a shell script. You can find a lot of online tutorials, but here I will only show a few examples which cover most of bioinformatician daily uses of awk.

choose rows where column 3 is larger than column 5:

awk '$3>$5' input.txt > output.txt

extract column 2,4,5:

awk '{print $2,$4,$5}' input.txt > output.txt

awk 'BEGIN{OFS="\t"}{print $2,$4,$5}' input.txt

show rows between 20th and 80th:

awk 'NR>=20&&NR<=80' input.txt > output.txt

calculate the average of column 2:

awk '{x+=$2}END{print x/NR}' input.txt

regex (egrep):

awk '/^test[0-9]+/' input.txt

calculate the sum of column 2 and 3 and put it at the end of a row or replace the first column:

awk '{print $0,$2+$3}' input.txt

awk '{$1=$2+$3;print}' input.txt

join two files on column 1:

awk 'BEGIN{while((getline<"file1.txt")>0)l[$1]=$0}$1 in l{print $0"\t"l[$1]}' file2.txt > output.txt

count number of occurrence of column 2 (uniq -c):

awk '{l[$2]++}END{for (x in l) print x,l[x]}' input.txt

apply "uniq" on column 2, only printing the first occurrence (uniq):

awk '!($2 in l){print;l[$2]=1}' input.txt

count different words (wc):

awk '{for(i=1;i!=NF;++i)c[$i]++}END{for (x in c) print x,c[x]}' input.txt

deal with simple CSV:

awk -F, '{print $1,$2}'

substitution (sed is simpler in this case):

awk '{sub(/test/, "no", $0);print}' input.txt

OK now here's where to read this stuff properly explained. roll

Two thorough tutorials:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html

http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Awk.html

A famous list of useful one-liners - though they're short, many are quite tricky:

http://www.pement.org/awk/awk1line.txt

And some nice explanations of those one-liners. After reading this you'll have a pretty good grasp!

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/awk-one-li … -part-one/

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/ten-awk-ti … -pitfalls/

Population genetics: A concise guide. John Gillespie.The Johns Hopkins University Press (1997)•

Population genetics. J. S. Gale. Wiley (1980)•

Evolutionary genetics. John Maynard-Smith. Oxford University Press (1998)•

The growth of biological thought. Ernst Mayr. Harvard University Press (1985)•

Guns, germs and steel. Jared Diamond. W. W. Norton (2007)•

Evolutionary theory: Mathematical and conceptual foundations. Sean Rice. Oxford University Press (2004)

(Indian Council of Medical Research )
Jehangir Merwanji Street, Parel, Mumbai 400 012

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More at http://www.nirrh.res.in/announcements/phd_program_2013.htm

Few places in Europe where good (and @some places no tution fees) master bioinformatics courses and recommended are:

KU Leuven, Belgium

http://onderwijsaanbod.kuleuven.be/opleidingen/e/CQ_50269018.htm

ETH, Zurich

http://www.cbb.ethz.ch/

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

http://studies.ku.dk/masters/bioinformatics/

University of Helsinki, Finland

http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/en/mbi/

Stockholm University, Sweden

http://www.sbc.su.se/masters/

Universities in Netherlands

http://www.nbic.nl/education/msc-programmes/

TUM , Munich Germany

http://www.mastersportal.eu/studies/865/bioinformatics.html

University of Bergen, Norway

http://www.uib.no/en/studieprogram/MAMN-INF/BI/plan

Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main

http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/58444439/mabi

Other links:

http://www.masterstudies.com/Masters-Degree/Bioinformatics/Europe/

https://studyinsweden.se/programmes/?query=bioinformatics&period=ht-2016&level=ma&subject=natural-science&university=#search

To cite BioNumbers please refer to: Milo et al. Nucl. Acids Res. (2010) 38: D750-D753. When using a specific entry from the database it is highly recommended that you also specify the BioNumbers 6 digit ID, e.g. "BNID 100986, Milo et al 2010". 

Address of the bookmark: http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/

http://www.biospectrumindia.com/biospecindia/features/203849/supercomputing-indian-agriculture-fast-track-mode/page/1