This practical and short guide presents a treatment of the general concepts of modern biology, providing the computer scientist with the tools necessary to read and understand current literature in the field by using experimental procedures and mechanisms.

The book is intended for students, researchers, and professionals with a computer science or physics background. It covers current topics in biology, such as bioinformatics and regular networks, biological systems, molecular biology, and experimental methods, and provides language and nomenclature to understand the jargon.

The integration of biology, physics, and computational sciences brings out the need to approach the subjects from several backgrounds, and to be updated in several fields. In keeping with the computer science approach, each chapter illustrates the link between biology and computer science, relating them to well-understood concepts of computer science.

This book presents a very good overview of current trends in biology. The information provided is not complete, but comprehensive enough to provide solid knowledge of biological processes from a computer science point of view. If you are going to work as a computer scientist in a biology field, this book will save you from having to read many books and papers to arrive at the level of knowledge you need. Furthermore, it provides good knowledge of biological processes in general, in the form of computational algorithms.

Cohen’s book is an effective tool for learning the current trends in biology, for computer scientists. It provides lucid, high-level descriptions of the fundamental concepts in biology and the basic mechanisms of life. It is a good choice of reading material when approaching modern scientific topics in biology.