This first introductory book designed to train novice programmers is based on a student course taught by the author, and has been optimized for biology students without previous experience in programming. By interspersing theory chapters with numerous small and large programming exercises, the author quickly shows readers how to do their own programming, and throughout uses anecdotes and real-life examples from the biosciences to 'spice up' the text. This practical book thus teaches essential programming skills for life scientists who want -- or need -- to write their own bioinformatics software tools.