A Computer Scientist's Guide to Cell Biology

What Hacker News says

1. jll29Aug 2026
   One take-away: At the very least, each school library schould provide:

   • Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

   • David Goodsell, The Machinery of Life

   • William W. Cohen, A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology

   • Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology

   • Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher

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2. the__alchemistApr 2024
   Perhaps this is obvious, but if you liked this article, check out the works referenced in it! The Eighth Day of Creation, The Machinery of Life, A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology, and GEB are all outsanding.
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3. joshuahedlundAug 2022
   Two recs:

   - There is a (short) book called "A Computer Scientist's Guide to Cell Biology" by William Cohen which is a little pricey but very dense and helpful with a lot of concepts.

   - Combine that with David Goodsell's "The Machinery of Life" which has a lot of great illustrations and practical examples.

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4. wombatmobileNov 2020
   Those books recommended in the article look good but are expensive.

   The Machinery of Life, David Goodsell

   A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology, William W. Cohen

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5. RodJan 2009
   You might find this book useful and interesting:

   A Computer Scientist's Guide to Cell Biology http://books.google.com/books?id=nAjhrOyBhIoC

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6. joshuahedlundJul 2022
   My impression from reading The Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology is that the reason for woefully inadequate descriptions of cellular systems, rather than any fundamental deficiency on the part of biologists, is that the systems are so dang tiny and crowded, with every molecule running into every other molecule every second or so, at sizes literally below the widths of light waves, that we just don’t have the tools to physically observe what’s happening in real-time. Even the primitive equivalents of “shooting individual components” took so much clever innovation and hard work to figure out how to do that frankly it’s amazing that we know everything that we do.
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