[BioEdu] What kind of programming skills should a bioinformatician have?

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Hi Erwin,

As I tell a lot of people, volunteering for an open-source project is a great way for people who'd like to enter the field to gain some experience.  Plus, most open-source projects are desperate for volunteer help.

There are 300+ open-source bioinformatics projects hosted at Bioinformatics.Org:

  http://bioinformatics.org/search/fullprojectlist.php

In our full list, we have information/database projects and not just software development projects.

http://SourceForge.net/ also has hundreds of bioinformatics projects, listed under the category "bio-informatics".

And you might also want to consider helping with some of the larger projects hosted at http://open-bio.org/.

Another place to look is in journals like BMC Bioinformatics and the Bioinformatics journal.  Every issue is loaded with descriptions of new tools, many of which could be licensed as Open Source (just ask them).

There are many of choices, so you can afford to be very picky about the subject matter of a project and the people who you'd be volunteering to help.

Cheers,
Jeff 

Erwin Sentausa wrote:
> Dear everyone,
> 
>  
> 
> Hi, my name is Erwin. I would like to know where I can learn some good 
> programming skills for bioinformatics. I have an M.Sc. degree in 
> bioinformatics, and I learned some Perl and Java in my graduate study, 
> but I don’t feel that I have the ability to be a good bioinformatician 
> yet. I came from chemistry background and I did not use any programming 
> in my graduate thesis.
> 
>  
> 
> I’d like to pursue a Ph.D. study but I notice that most (or all) of the 
> Ph.D. opportunities in bioinformatics require either “a strong 
> programming background” or “experience in software development”, which I 
> have none. Now I would like to improve my programming skills before 
> applying for a Ph.D. studentship. Do you have any recommendations on 
> what kind of education I should take to do that? Your answers will be 
> much appreciated. Thank you.
> 
>  
> 
> Yours,
> 
> Erwin
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
J.W. Bizzaro
Bioinformatics Organization, Inc. (Bioinformatics.Org)
E-mail: jeff at bioinformatics.org
Phone:  +1 978 562 4800
--