Yes, Mastering Perl is a very nice book. It's interesting in that it doesn't focus on the particulars of the Perl language, but rather on how to use some very powerful modules. I am constantly surprised by the number of modules that I could have or should have used but didn't find out about until much later, and Mastering Perl is I think helping me avoid that...
The Perl for Bioinformatics book I have is "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" by James Tisdall. There is I think a more recent book out (perhaps by the same author), but I haven't seen that one. The Bioinformatics book though is very much about processing biological data, focusing in particular on DNA and Genome data...these are in some ways big string matching problems, so Perl is a pretty good choice, and indeed there are some nice Perl modules that can help out with that...I have not actually had much practical use for the techniques in this book, just because I don't really ever work with biological data, but instead focus on text (what else would I do?? ;) that is written in medical settings (like clinical notes, or articles about medical issues). But it's an interesting book that does give a little bit of an introduction to some of the data one sees in Bioinformatics. In terms of general AI books, I'm guessing I was talking about "Empirical Methods for AI" by Paul Cohen. This remains one of my favorite books, and does a good job in talking about how to set up and evaluation experiments in an AI setting (which is similar in many respects to what we do in NLP, and indeed some of his examples or language related...) I have been reading the 2nd edition of the Weka book lately, and that's quite nice...Data Mining, by Witten and Frank. It has quite a bit of discussion about Machine Learning concepts and algorithms, and of course is quite invaluable if one is using Weka (although they do a nice job of making it a Machine Learning book that uses Weka, as opposed to it being just a Weka book). So, those are some of the books I've been thinking about and reading lately...Hope this helps! Enjoy, Ted On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 3:36 PM, Bridget Thomson McInnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Ted, > > I will look at this. It also seems like it might be a good idea to pick up > my Mastering Perl book next time I am in MN and start reviewing it. > > What did you think about the Perl for Bioinformatics book? There was also > an AI book that I remember you mentioning - this is also not the first > time I have forgotten the name of it. I should start a list on Amazon to > keep track of them. > > Thanks! > > Bridget > > On Thu, 10 Jul 2008, Ted Pedersen wrote: > >> A number of our packages produce logs of various kinds, just showing >> what happens >> at a certain date - time and recording that into a file we can look >> back on when >> debugging, etc. It turns out there are some perl modules that could >> help us with >> that, as discussed in the following chapter of "Mastering Perl"... >> >> http://www252.pair.com/comdog/mastering_perl/Chapters/13.logging.html >> >> The two packages discussed above are Log4perl and Log::Dispatch... >> >> http://search.cpan.org/dist/Log-Log4perl/ >> http://search.cpan.org/dist/Log-Dispatch/ >> >> Log files turn out to be invaluable when trying to figure out what has >> gone right >> or wrong with a system, so I think the above are well worth looking >> into... >> >> Enjoy, >> Ted >> >> -- >> Ted Pedersen >> http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse >> > -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse
