Forum:Best way to spend money to learn Bioinformatics

Question

[Daniel Neel]

Hey all, this might be an odd/broad question. I picked up a few Amazon gift cards over Christmas, and one of my goals this year is to get involved with/learn how to contribute to Bioinformatics. I realize that the most important component of doing this will be how much time/effort I put in - not how much money I spend. That being said, is there anything a person can spend money on to help them be a better bioinformatician? Books, cloud computing time, computing hardware, something else?

[Manuel Landesfeind]

As Amazon has been a book store sometime in the past, why not look at this Biostars thread: Recommend Your Favorite Bioinformatics Books

[anp375]

Associates degree-level comp sci study, no architecture or assembly. Probability, statistics. Intro-bio to cell bio - 2-3 classes/textbooks, little bit of organic chem, little bit of biochem, coursera, Then, work. You probably know a lot of this already.

Answer 1

[Jenez]

There are a lot of free things you could do before the need to spend money arises. It depends on where in your bioinformatics career you are...

If you intend to perform heavy computations then cloud computing is a viable option. You could rent server space to keep your data, and put up a remote server when you need to run a few analysis.

You could spend some money on a decent local computer. But again, the specs depends on what you intend do to with it. Sometimes, large amounts of RAM is a necessity, and sometimes not...

The more information you provide about yourself, the more people can give suggestions that fit your intentions

[John]

I agree - the best way to learn bioinformatics is to do it, and the only limitation of doing bioinformatics is that some programs just require extortionate amounts of RAM to even run. Buying yourself a computer with 64Gb of RAM is probably worth more than owning 100 books that are sitting around gathering dust in your local library. And the manuals for all the software are online anyway. Plus if you decide bioinformatics isn't for you, you still got that RAM. Unemployment is better with RAM.

Answer 2

[Benn]

Spend your money on a good course, given by a well-known bioinformatics institute or university. Pick out a course in the field of your interest!

[Emily]

Do they usually take Amazon gift vouchers?

[Benn]

I am not sure, I never had any Amazon gift vouchers...

Answer 3

[Jean-Karim Heriche]

There are different areas in bioinformatics so you should probably figure out what you're most interested in. In my view the best way to learn is by doing. Depending on your situation, you could even get paid for learning e.g. as a PhD student or postdoc or if you have programming or IT skills, I can imagine you could find a bioinformatics-related job that lets you learn other areas.

Answer 4

[Ibrahim Tanyalcin]

Dear,

Colleagues have written some useful stuff here. However, as with all other things to learn, the "best" way is to start tinkering right away. No book can teach you what you learn by changing a piece of code and seeing how it behaves. Yes...no book/course can teach that.

Regards,

Answer 5

[jimmy_zeng]

It's very interesting to learn the different field about bioinformatics one by one.

For bioinformatics training, I can teach you from A to Z if you are a Chinese. but for USA, sorry , I still need to practice my English .

Answer 6

[radhika]

you can try short term bioinformatic trainings/ workshops organized by ArrayGen Technologies Pvt. Ltd. please visit our link for more details: http://www.arraygen.com/workshop-training.php