Developing effective bioinformatics programming skills

Back on Coast to Coast Bio #13 we talked about Joel Dudley’s seminar on programming effectively for bioinformatics (slides). Joel has converted that into a article in PLoS Computational Biology. For many Biogangers, the article might be obvious, but for many getting their start, or getting into the programming side of things, this paper is a great read. It also is very contemporary and talks about a lot of current best practices. Some of the key areas which are often forgotten by scientific programmers

• Documenting and managing projects
• Maintaining source code
• Parallel computing, including shoutouts to the kinds of distributed computing paradigms that I find particularly interesting
• Structured data

If you are expecting a deep dive into each topic this is not the article you are looking for, but if you want an overview of some core principles you could do a lot worse. The article is also a great addition to programming-centric bioinformatics articles published by Rubyists