What is the difference between Computational Biology & Bioinformatics?

Which is better to learn for biology: Perl or Python, C or C++?

• It's the summer before school and I thought that I should learn something new and useful. I read somewhere that to get a good grasp for bioinformatics, you should learn one programming language, C or C++, and one scripting language, Perl or Python. I'm not entirely sure about the differences between computational biology and bioinformatics, but I'm going to assume the answer would be similar for both. I'm not very familiar with computer languages, I know the names but that's about it. I got stuck at deciding between Perl and Python, and both sides seem to be extremely passionate in their viewpoint. I haven't even looked at C and C++. In your opinion which two out of the four are better for a biology student, in terms of job prospects and their applications in modelling biological systems and analyzing molecular and genomic data? Can I learn them well for free (using online tutorials and downloads)? Also which are easier to learn and run? I'm not too worried about the difficulty of a language, I will persevere if I know that it is the 'right' one for me to learn. I'm not in IT and I really don't want to learn something and realize that it's unnecessary or that there's a faster, more accepted way to do things in biology. Having said that, I generally don't mind taking a slightly longer or harder route if it pays off and means that I will be able to apply concepts better in biology/produce work of better quality. I'm specializing in molecular biology and genetics, and I took an introduction to programming course in high school where we learned Visual Basic (I was pretty good at it because I learned quickly and enjoyed it). I'd appreciate information from anyone (I don't know much about these languages really), especially from someone in computational biology/bioinformatics. Thank you!

• Answer:

  i can't be of much help to you but i am a bio student and I took a course called "programming for scientists" which was all in Python. It is a really diverse and easy to learn programing language I picked it up really fast. After six months I could code all kinds of maths and science scripts (prime number generators, fractal graphing, matrix algebra, DNA mutation probability, a mass spectroscopy tool...) as well as bots that perform mundane web tasks and a few other useful things. The scripts are always pretty small and easy to throw together and the documentation is so good that once you have learnt the basics you can pick up any other part of the language (I only learnt about the science functions but learnt the web stuff afterwards in my spare time quite easily). I have heard that C and C++ are both horrifically hard to learn and most computer colleges at universities start students off on python or something similar learning extra languages after your first is easier anyway. I bet that anyone working in programming bioinformatics has an easy scripting language that they use for basic tasks that they just want to do quickly and one of the streamlined high performance languages when they are doing something big heavy and important. you can also get python and C/C++ to interact i think so that you can write most of a program in python and then just the bits that need to be fast in C. I don't know how you will go learning on your own. it was really useful to have people who could answer questions and debug my scripts so you should find that somewhere http://stackoverflow.com/ might be the best place. also try and get familiar with linux if you aren't already, it has a heck load more support for programming. I would recommend learning python. For your undergrad it will definitely give you a boost and is easy enough to pick up. Even if you don't end up needing it for your course work you will find nifty little ways of using it around the place.