If you are already an accomplished programmer, your best bet would be to get some background in biology and statistics.

I work at an academic genome sequencing center and most of my programming is data munging. If I didn't have a background in biology, I would still be able to implement my programs, but my job wouldn't be as interesting.

If you are looking for good biology textbook take a look at Recombinant DNA by James Watson. Its not as behemoth as Molecular Biology of the Cell and is a classic.