Excellent serious book about biology -- no chemistry needed. | An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design...

Awesome book | An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits (Chapman & Hall/Crc Mathematical ... | Uri Alon

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	• An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits (Chapman & Hall/Crc Mathematical ... Uri Alon Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2006 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent stuff!

I am a macromolecular crystallographer interested in theoretical systems biology, and this book is a real goldmine. It explains all the concepts behind biochemical systems and networks in a clear, lucid language. This book is a pleasure to read, for both biologists and mathematicians alike.

Excellent serious book about biology -- no chemistry needed.

This is a great book for learning about how biology works. I've been wanting to learn a bit more about biology, and I've read many of the popularized science books on the subject. Most serious biology books require a pretty good understanding of organic chemistry. (At first that didn't seem like a problem, after all organic chemistry is just regular chemistry with a bunch of carbon atoms lying around, but the jargon gets so dense that you lose track of what's going on.) This book offers an entirely different perspective on biology that is much more accessible to someone with a general interest in science.

This book looks at biology from the perspective of how genes and proteins interact at a network level, rather than a chemical level. It's a lot like learning electronics -- you can understand a lot about a transistor without knowing how semiconductors work. After explaining the operation of some of the most common network "motifs" the author talks about why those motifs were favored by evolution, in particular what makes them robust and how can they act to minimize errors. The book leaves you with the very interesting question of what characteristics might be different between an engineered system and an evolved one?

The language of the book is very clear, this is a technical book you could easily read for fun. The math is simple, just a little calculus, and if you don't care about the math you can just look at the diagrams.

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Awesome book

Awesome book! The author did a great job in presenting the topics in an easy and enjoyable way.

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Fascinating!

What a great book! If you have any interest in how biological systems function and what principles lay in their most basic designs, you must read it!
It's very clearly written. I think almost everyone will find it accessible and interesting, no matter what your education level is or your primary field (but I think engineers will get a particular kick out of it). There is quite a bit of math, but it's very basic and even if you skip all of it, you will still learn a lot from the book.
I found the whole subject fascinating and intriguing. Sure, biological systems are not as simple as this book may seem to portray, but there is no doubt in my mind that the ideas presented here are quite relevant to biology and indeed underlay many of the real-world biological phenomena.

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Clear, rigorous, fascinating

I'm a Ph.D. student in biophysics. This is the best treatment of systems biology that I've encountered. It treats both the math and the biology with clarity, rigor, and respect. It simplifies without dumbing down. It's beautifully written. If you doubt that systems biology is a real scientific discipline, this book will change your mind.

Thorough and accessible, this book presents the design principles of biological systems, and highlights the recurring circuit elements that make up biological networks. It provides a simple mathematical framework which can be used to understand and even design biological circuits. The textavoids specialist terms, focusing instead on several well-studied biological systems that concisely demonstrate key principles.

An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits builds a solid foundation for the intuitive understanding of general principles. It encourages the reader to ask why a system is designed in a particular way and then proceeds to answer with simplified models.

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