Having a bioinformatics background and working in a cancer research "wet-lab" I was often asked to analyze TCGA data, examine the expression of different genes across tumor subtypes etc...
Although it was very enjoyable and rewarding to help fellow lab members, I was always seeking for ways to streamline these processes to spare everyone's time :) As time passed, some amazing online tools offering a visual GUI started to appear, providing access to non-computation biologists to TCGA data. Today these websites have reached an impressive level, allowing to conduct complex queries quickly, download and present this data.
I wrote a short review of the top TCGA analysis tools that I know of and trust. These includes the GDC data portal, cBioPortal, Xena browser, MEXPRESS & TCGA2STAT (assuming you know R).
I'd love to hear your thoughts about this trend, should we teach researchers to code or build interfaces? Did I miss any useful resources?
TCGAbiolinks is another excellent R package.