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Biologist's Guide to Computing - almost there

Last week I announced the launch of the Biologist’s Guide to Computing website and the response was tremendous.

Thank you all!

I thought I’d take the opportunity to provide a status update.

The first draft of the book is finished. Yay! In its current form it has 47,000 words, spread over 195 pages, split into 14 chapters.

Although, I call it the first draft each chapter has undergone several revisions as I have received feedback from many of my colleague, to whom I am very grateful. Thanks to Nadia Radzman, Sam Mugford and Anna Stavrinides for providing feedback on early versions of the initial chapters. Many thanks to Tyler McCleary for continued in depth feedback and suggestions for improvements. Thanks also to Nick Pullen for feedback and discussions on the data visualisation chapter. Finally, many thanks to Matthew Hartley for all the discussions and encouragement.

So what happens now?

I will go over the draft with a red pen and I’m sure that I will find plenty of things that needs fixing.

Then I will make the book available more broadly under creative commons licence to get more feedback.

I’m currently debating if I should try to get a publisher or if I should self publish. Does anyone have any thoughts or recommendations with regards to this?

If I go down the self publishing route I’d like to find a copy editor that has some grasp of both coding and biology. Does anyone know of such a person?

Finally, I am pondering how I can publicise the book. Please do help me spread the word by pointing people at the Biologist’s Guide to Computing website. The website has a newsletter sign up form, please do sign up to it. By signing up you encourage me to finish the project! Also, if you are a blogger and would consider writing a review of the book I will give you early access to it. Please do get in touch if you would be interested in this.