Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references.

ch. 1. Parsing and transforming text files -- ch. 2. Utility scripts -- ch. 3. Viewing and modifying images -- ch. 4. Indexing text -- ch. 5. The National Library of Medicine's Medical subject headings (MeSH) -- ch. 7. SEER -- ch. 8. OMIM -- ch. 9. PubMed -- ch. 10. Taxonomy -- ch. 11. Developmental lineage classification and taxonomy of neoplasms -- ch. 12. U.S. Census files -- ch. 13. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mortality files -- ch. 14. Autocoding -- ch. 15. Text scrubber for deidentifying confidential text -- ch. 16. Web pages and CGI scripts -- ch. 17. Image annotation -- ch. 18. Describing data with data using XML -- ch. 19-27. Case stud[ies] -- Epilogue for healthcare professionals and medical scientists.

A guide for applying basic informatics algorithms to medical data sets. It includes examples using three most common programming languages (Perl, Python, and Ruby). It provides basic methods for retrieving, organizing, merging, and analyzing their data sources. It covers building blocks, primary tasks of medical informatics, and medical discovery