Personally, I'd welcome a bioinformatics tutorial. I made the switch from doing general software development to research bioinformatics two years ago. With zero background in biology or genetics, there was definitely a serious learning curve.

However, many of the problems in bioinformatics are not really that different. Once you get a handle on the terminology and types of problems involved, it's much like any other text mining, data manipulation, or analysis project.

Two books that I found helpful:

• Genomic Perl: From Bioinformatics Basics to Working Code
• Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics by James Tisdall

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