Many years ago we started programming in Python because we were working on a large computational biology project. In those days choosing Python was not nearly as common as it is today. Nonetheless things worked out well, and as our expertise grew it seemed only natural that we should run some elementary Python courses for the School of Biology at the University of Cambridge, where we were employed. The basis for those courses is what turned into the initial idea for this book. While there were many books about getting started with Python and some that were tailored to bioinformatics, we felt that there was still some room for what we wanted to put across. We began with the idea that we could write some chapters in relatively straightforward English that were aimed at biologists, who might be complete novices at programming, and have other sections that are useful to a more experienced programmer. Also, given that we didn’t consider ourselves to be typical bioinformaticians, we were thinking more broadly than just sequence-based informatics, though naturally such things would be included. We felt that although we couldn’t anticipate all the requirements of a biological programmer there were nonetheless a number of key concepts and techniques which we could try to explain. The end result is hopefully a toolkit of ideas and examples which can be applied by biologists in a variety of situations.

Acknowledgements

We extend our sincere thanks to a group of intrepid volunteers who have been invaluable in the proof-reading and testing of this book: Olga Tkachenko, Magnus Lundborg, Neil Rzechorzek, Rasmus Fogh, Simon Fraser and Tom Drury.