Biology Meets Programming
Bioinformatics for Beginners

Dude, Pavel Pevsner has a free Coursera on python bioinformatics. It's super legit. https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics

It's absolute beginners stuff, but I don't care who you are, if you can follow Pavel (by what he's saying...or...the subtitles....dude's accent is heavy at times) you'll learn something.

If you know Javascript and Java you shouldn't really have any issue with picking up Python either so coursera's bioinformatics might be a nice jumping board. If they have a good forum or place to ask questions on that course you can probably find people with good resources for your interests.

I hope you can still enroll for free, I can with my account but I don't know how it behaves for new Coursera accounts.

Also anecdotally in my faculty most programming outside the CS department I predominantly saw use of C++ for performance sensitive stuff, Python for flexible research tools and then there was a strong group of Mathematica users right behind that. Edit: Inside CS I saw a few lecturers with an obsession with the R language but I in my persional opnion think it is one of the worst ones for teaching classifiers or handeling 'big data' type situtations and writing it is just a disaster but there are "R for biologist" materials out there. I guess "Programming for Biologists" is a good thing to google anyway.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics/home/welcome

Biology Meets Programming: Bioinformatics for Beginners

Perhaps you should start by taking a free short introductory course in bioinformatics for biologists. Here’s one at Coursera that I’ve been told has been really helpful

Biology Meets Programming: Bioinformatics for Beginners | University of California San Diego https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics

I took a course in Comp. Geometry and now I'll be soon working in Bioinformatics. So, naturally, I thought if it's possible to apply any of the algorithms learned from the first to the latter.

I agree that they're much different. Most of the problems I've seen so far in Bioinformatics (in courses as this: https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics/) have to do with algorithms on strings. And I can't think of anything similar from Comp. Geometry. Perhaps some geometric data structures as k-d or range trees could be useful though for fast searching.

I haven't looked much into geometric clustering algorithms, but they could be useful too. As far as I've read clustering algorithms are being used in Bioinformatics.

First of all, congrats for your choice ;) I'm doing bioinformatics right now and is important to have a minimum knowledge on programming, even for running someone's else software. You can be a basic bioinformatician and perform analysis using available software (it's okay and they're necessary too because sometimes it's hard to do it and to interpret the results) or you can be develope your own software and analysis. In this case, you really have to know how to program.

It's weird that your university doesn't teach you basic programming, maybe it's not specified but you will do. If not, maybe you should think about going to another university.

In bioinformatics the most used programming languages are Python and R (most for the statistics part), and you should also be used to work with the Linux command line. There's a lot of online courses on coursera to learn this.

Python: https://www.coursera.org/learn/python (I did this one when I started) https://www.coursera.org/learn/python-genomics? https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics https://www.coursera.org/specializations/bioinformatics

R: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-science-foundations-r?

Linux: https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-linux

Enjoy the journey! Programming could be really frustrating sometimes, but hold on! And the end it's really fulfilling. Hope it helped :)

For beginner level courses I recommend these (you can audit these for free if you don't want a certificate)

-> https://www.coursera.org/specializations/python

-> https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics

I highly recommend the "Biology Meets Programming" course on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics

This is the best I could find; not quite what you asked for but at least it's something

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpSOMAcxEB_jUKMvdl8rHqNiZXFIrtd5G

https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics

https://www.coursera.org/courses?query=Bioinformatics

I am coming from exactly opposite direction: software engineer being fascinated by biology trying to get into biotech industry - so my comment may be skewed that way.

That being said, I tried the aforementioned courses by Johns Hopkins and while they were not bad, they did not really stand out - maybe it's me, but it was just dry enumeration of basic facts, click here, load data there, without much of the deeper reasoning/explanation, to the point that I had trouble to keep my concentration.

I enjoyed much more the Bioinformatics specialization by UC San Diego: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/bioinformatics

It also has a version bit more accessible to people w/o lots of computer science experience: https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics?

As well as external support website with tons of extra exercises and nice hands-on introduction to Python that may get you started: http://rosalind.info/problems/locations/

I also started the specialisation by Uni of Toronto, but at that time, I was lacking needed biology background, so I dropped off. Still, it looked like something definitely worth of checking out: https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics-methods-1

Are these going the direction you had in mind or are they going too much into programming?

how much money can you spend ?

this online course was offered last fall

https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/courses/big-data-healthcare-applications/15168

if its offered again this fall I'm thinking of taking it -- but it fills up FAST

there are also this non-credit specializations from coursera to help get you up to speed with your math

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/mathematics-machine-learning

and this for bioinformatics

https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics

^ this is one recommended for beginners before doing the speciallization below

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/bioinformatics

maybe those + the BS in data analytics would be a good start to get your where you want to go

Review this online courses list to start my biohacker career

Hi all, I'm pretty interested in getting into the biohacking, bioinformatics and everything related to the tech involved in the microscopic world, since I think it will become more and more demanded with time due to the Covid and other human life threats. So here is a list of courses I believe would help me and everyone planing on starting out in the biohacking field, and I also would like you to help me review it.

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https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics

https://www.coursera.org/learn/industrial-biotech

https://www.coursera.org/learn/wgs-bacteria

https://www.coursera.org/learn/chemical-biology

https://www.coursera.org/learn/methods-of-molecular-biology

https://www.coursera.org/learn/algae-biotechnology