i've read this one too. my observations:

the intended audience is definitely not programmers who are looking to get into bioinformatics (although they'll still find it a good read). it's biologists who are looking to learn more computer skills to help them with bioinformatics. it does a good job at that. most perlmonks would probably find the technical stuff (in particular the section on perl) very introductory.

similarly, the biology/genetics sections are fairly brisk; they seem to be intended to review the material just enough that the biologists can understand the context of the CS material without getting too bored.

it also skips over some of the more advanced topics with only a brief mention (eg, hidden markov models and support vector machines) but i can hardly blame an introductory book for that.

that said, it is an excellent introduction for people with more bio background than CS and not a bad reference for anyone else. the unix tutorial is one of the best that i've seen in any book and does a very good job of explaining streams and conveying the power of the unix philosophy.

plus, the book mentions my former bioinformatics prof, bill grundy (err, now "william stafford noble", i guess), one of the authors of Meta-MEME. :)

anders pearson