<p>Hi everyone,
I wasn't sure exactly where to post this, so feel free to move this wherever I may get the most useful feedback!</p>
<p>Anyway, I'm a rising senior at a university studying computer science and mathematics. However, I am interested in computational biology and bioinformatics. I intend to pursue this for graduate school (this is not a graduate school related question, mind you). Basically, I am interested in beginning to gain a deeper understanding of biochemistry without taking the courses (time is no longer on my side). I have only taken a general biology class and a general chemistry class, and I am a little rusty in both (the exception being an area like genomics where I have done some bioinformatics related projects).</p>
<p>Now, with this background in mind, can you folks recommend me some good textbooks in biology and chemistry? I am ultimately interested in proteomics, genomics, cell biology, and biochemistry, so a focus there would be good. I am also looking to do this cheaply...so I was considering buying an older edition of some of the books on Amazon.com. One likely purchase is an older version of "Molecular Biology of the Cell", but I'm hoping to get some other good recommendations. It may also be good to remember that my reading will not be supplemented by any lectures, so an easy-to-understand book would be nice. :)</p>
<p>Please understand that I'm not looking to master the subjects, but to complement my current understanding and allow me to quench my interests in these areas (and have some possible reference material for later on). Anyway, any help with this would be greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>The library would be a good place to start. I'd browse my university's library and take out any textbooks of interest. You can narrow down which ones you want to own. Sorry I can't help with any specific titles.</p>
<p>As someone else who wants to self-study biology (whose university's bio dept is choke full of self-studiable pre-reqs), I second this thread.</p>
<p>First of all, I'd try out the Demystified series. Those are easy, but are deeper than 1st year undergrad things AND are great at providing a conceptual overview of things you want to map out later (when studying biology, there is WAY too much for you to memorize in one book, and so it's important to organize your mental map so that you can map out what you need to memorize and what you can quickly look up when you need to look it up). </p>
<p>Second of all, try the study guides in conjunction with textbooks in the university libraries. For example, have you heard of Genetic Analysis? (Lewontin et. al). it has full solutions to every problem in its student solutions manual. And much more.</p>
<p>Also, Wikipedia is actually surprisingly helpful for a lot of biology topics. It also provides insight that textbooks normally wouldn't provide (insight as to hypothesized interactions that might come out of some system that textbooks don't specify).</p>
<p>==
As for the mathematics that you're studying - how far are you going there? I'm very curious as to which fields of mathematics are relevant later on to bio (it may diversity with time)</p>
<p>Statistics, Probability....also calculus and differential equations. The applied side of mathematics. And definitely computer science. (I'm a rising junior math major who wants to go to grad school for genomics also....glad to see that it's not completely a crazy path). We used iGenetics for an introductory second semester of biology. I can't remember how much chemistry was in it, but it provided a strong Mendelian background (which you might already have).</p>