Things I would tell a budding bioinformatician to learn.

I recently read Ewan Birney's blog post, which I found echoed a lot of my own thoughts about the use of statistical in computational biology. I thought I would compile my own similar list but for bioinformatics  / computational biology in general. I have not been and in the field as long as Ewan and I certainly still have a lot to learn, particularly about statistics due to my biological background, but I have learnt some things over the last ten years, that like Ewan, I wish someone had told me long ago.  The points are in no particular order.

Sweave in TeXShop

I love using TeXShop for GUI editing of LaTeX and particularly Sweave documents, but it is a pain not being able to get it to automatically generate the pdf output. Luckily I found this post which explains how to add a Sweave engine.

Basically, make a file called Sweave.engine in ~/Library/TeXShop/Engines/

#!/bin/bash                                                                                                   

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/texbin:/usr/local/bin
R CMD Sweave "$1"
pdflatex -interaction batchmode "${1%.*}"
pdflatex -interaction batchmode "${1%.*}"

The just select Sweave as the document type and Typeset now works, easy.