Page 189 - DCAP408_WEB_PROGRAMMING

Unit 6: DOM Model

Towards the end of the book, the author writes: “India, Malaysia and the Philippines, the Notes
three South Asian countries benefiting from outsourcing phenomenon would themselves
be outsourcing their work once they too grow to be of world class.” What a pipedream,
you may think. But he adds: “This is happening already; an Indian company has set up a
BPO unit in Malaysia. And Indian IT companies are buying up many small US companies
and turning them around.” Is that making you sit up already?
Blessed are the Perl-iterates

BIOLOGY is a life science, while computing is a machine world. But computers have
become commonplace in biology, writes D. Curtis Jamison in “Perl Programming for
Bioinformatics & Biologists”, from Wiley Dreamtech (www.wileydreamtech.com) .
“Almost every biology lab has some type of computer, and the uses of the computer range
from manuscript preparation to Internet access, from data collection to data crunching.”
The field of bioinformatics can be split into two broad areas, states the intro:
“Computational biology and analytical bioinformatics.” The former is about “formal
algorithms and testable hypotheses of biology, encoded into various programs”;
computationists “spend their time thinking about the mathematics of biology” and develop
bioinformatic tools such as BLAST or FASTA. Analytical bioinformatics puts those tools to
use for tasks such as sequencing or regression.
Why Perl? Because it is the most widely used scripting language in bioinformatics, notes
the author. What is Perl? Its author Larry Wall christened it so for ‘practical extraction and
reporting language’, because it was originally created “for parsing files and creating
formatted reports”. The name could just as easily stand for ‘pathologically eclectic rubbish
lister’ Wall had jested because the language is “perfect for rummaging through files
looking for a particular pattern or characters, or for reformatting data tables.”

How do these scientists put the language to use? For quick and dirty creation of small
analysis programs, such as “to parse a nucleotide sequence into the reverse complement
sequence”. Such a program is called `glutility’ - because it takes the output of one program
and changes it into a form suitable for import into another program.
The book is replete with bio examples, such as storing DNA segment into a string, and
using Perl’s power “to find motifs, translate DNA sequences to RNA, or transcribe RNA
sequences to protein”; deploying Bioperl that ships with Tools distribution; applying
splice to truncate an array, e.g. splice(@genes, 1). What a blessing to have Perl help in bio
work! But `blessing’ a referent is the actual trick to creating object-oriented Perl code,
writes the author. “The bless command marks the referent as belonging to a particular
class or package.” Okay, how to bless? bless($reference, “package_name”). Count yourself
blessed if you are Perl-iterate!
Coding is the ‘easy’ part
THE Mars expedition has Java running far, far away. For the earthlings, Paul Hatcher and
John Gosney write JavaScript Professional Projects, a book from Easwar Press
(www.eswarbooks.com) . “This book is not beginner-level basic tutorial, but a more
advanced exploration of a real-world project that will show you how to implement
JavaScript in actual applications,” warns the intro. Center Park School is the fictitious
project for which you play Web designer. “Rather than just throwing a bunch of sample
code at you and asking you to make sense of it on your own, the project is divided into
chapters that deal with a specific aspect of the final Web site.” If you thought all design is
about coding, you could be wrong. “Actual coding of a project is often the `easy’ part, and
developing a design plan and project template the real challenge,” say the authors.
“Working with clients can be a daunting task, especially if those customers are not
technically minded.”
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