Is there a SICP of biology?
mjtokelly: When I started out in a systems biology lab with a physics and CS background but no biology, they gave me this book:Molecular Biology of the Cell
http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Alberts-Al/dp/0...The description of the DNA --> RNA --> protein pipeline was really satisfying to someone with my background, full of codes, error-correction algorithms, and rate-limiting steps.  I think of it as the Numerical Recipes of biology.