My early sign up present was a copy of "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics"

If you're new to perl, and interested in bioinformatics, then team it up with a copy of "Learning Perl" from O'Reilly and sit down with a few coffees.

The book really outlines the principles of data manipulation in biological questions, and takes you through many common tasks for which I'm sure, most bioinformaticians have written their own, similar programs.

Some of the tricks are trivial, even simplistic, and I found it interesting to compare it to my own home grown routines in places. However it is not made clear (and I think this is a real let down with the book) that the majority of the manipulations are readily available and more elegantly done in Bioperl (http://bio.perl.org). Whilst Bioperl gets a mention, anyone using perl in a bioinformatics environment will be using Bioperl to do these manipulations. Its a bit like rolling your own CGI scripts because you've not discovered CGI.pm yet.

It has been useful, and maybe now I'm out of the 'newbie' perl phase I look down a little on some of the code, but as a new perl user, the book will give you the confidence to move forward with a clear mental toolkit for attacking future problems.

Bukowski - aka Dan (dcs@black.hole-in-the.net)
"Coffee for the mind, Pizza for the body, Sushi for the soul" -Userfriendly