Book Review: Handbook of Hidden Markov Models in Bioinformatics

I read the book Handbook of Hidden Markov Models in Bioinformatics by Martin Gollery. This book is meant for a short introduction about the HMM in bioinformatics, especially in sequence analysis. It don’t dig into the detailed algorithm of behind statistical and mathematical language. But it is very useful for those who want to have a primary knowledge about HMM in bioinformatics and want to have a little practical experience in sequence analysis. It is very suitable for students who don’t have statistical or mathematical background, and want to use HMM related database to have new or further investigation about biology.
This book provide commonly used databases related to HMM, such as Pfam, prosite, and so on. and give some practical exercise about it. Besides, it give the basic logic of HMM database, and How to generate our own HMM database.

As it says in the foreword:

In the past ten years I have encountered numerous students and researchers who have asked me for instruction on the basics of profile Hidden Markov Models and their use in bioinformatics. The lectures that were presented in this area were well suited to those of a more mathematical bent, but baffling to those who actually wanted to use HMMs to analyze data. As a result, the use of profile HMMs has been slowed somewhat, as people tend to hesitate when asked to use what they do not understand. Eventually, I condensed this lecture into a formal presentation at the request of Dr. Jeff Harper to present to a group of his graduate students. This grew to become a tutorial at the ISMB conference, and I was then asked to expand it into a book. It is my hope that you find it useful in your future work.

I strongly recommend it to all biologist and biological students, especially in protein sequence research.