Primer

There are several definitions for the word “Primer“. Here I refer to it as any reference, be it a textbook or article, that introduces basic concepts of a topic.Primer

Data science

An introduction to ROC analysis
Machine learning is way easier than it looks
Receiver Operating Characteristic Analysis: A Primer
Some Things Every Biologist Should Know about Machine Learning
What is a hidden Markov model? (In addition, check this out.)
Understanding SVD right down to the basics
Data mining algorithms in R
PCA for dummies
Introduction to Data Technologies

Bioinformatics

Collection of primers on computational biology topics
Precision Medicine Bioinformatics – Introduction to bioinformatics for DNA and RNA sequence analysis
Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research
A Quick Guide to Organizing Computational Biology Projects
Communicating with a lay audience about scientific subjects
Collection of published “guides” for bioinformaticians
The ten simple rule collection from PLOS Computational Biology.
RNA-Seq primer by Michele Busby.
How Not to Be a Bioinformatician
Core services: Reward bioinformaticians

Statistics

Statistics for Biologists
Explaining Odds Ratios
A series of blog posts on statistics
A biologist’s guide to statistical thinking and analysis
BMJ Statistics Notes
A beginners guide to interpreting odds ratios, confidence intervals and p values
Experimental design

Bayesian statistics

An Intuitive (and Short) Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem
Bayes’ theorem
Book written for the Bayesian Statistics course.
What is Bayesian statistics?
Bayesian Data Analysis book
Bayesian statistics
Bayesian networks
Little Book of R Bayesian Statistics

Biology

Error bars in experimental biology
Introduction to Confocal Microscopy
Flow Cytometry
Research techniques made simple offers readers the opportunity to learn more about important laboratory techniques (such as confocal microscopy and flow cytometry)
ENCODE: the rough guide to the human genome
Long noncoding RNAs: the search for function
Somatic versus germinal mutation
Cre/lox breeding for dummies
Single-cell sequencing

Links

Educational papers from Nature Biotechnology and PLoS Computational Biology
On data visualisation
Explained Visually is an experiment in making hard ideas intuitive
My Twitter favourites