How can a Rookie that only know how to do wet experiment start on learning bioinformatics?

Question

[muhe1985]

As stated in the title.

I am a PhD student in development biology. Recently, I am starting on to provide some ChIP samples for downstream Chip-Seq. Although at this point I don't need to do anything at the data analysis end, I think it is super fun to learn how to do it!

However, there is no one around me who is doing that so I could learn from in person.

Is there any quick tutorial that can walk me through how to get started? I hope I could learn some basic stuffs soon such like how to play around with public available BED files. And also learn to appreciate mainstream bioinformatics publications.

Also, what is the first language to learn?(this must be super dumb)

[Prakki Rama]

may be these posts should give you some idea where to start

• Advice For Newcomers To The Bioinformatics Field
• A: How Did You Learn Good Practice In Bioinformatics/Computational Biology?

[muhe1985]

Thank you all for your replys!!! I learned just from your posts!

Answer 1

[poisonAlien]

A lot of tools in analysis are command line based (including in your case - ChIP seq). So it is absolute necessary for you to know the basics of Unix. But trust me its not that hard.

You could start from this: Unix and Perl for Biologists

Also you may wanna look at R

Answer 2

[pld]

I'd learn R, one scripting language (Python, Perl, etc) and be familiar enough to hack out scripts in the other languages. Knowing Unix/Linux is important. I wouldn't start till I was confident with scripting.

On the other hand, one can argue that you can do plenty of bioinformatics with webtools and other GUI based things. Ensembl is a great example. As a bioinformatics starting point, I would get a really solid grasp of sequence alignment.