Describes the fundamental issues and questions in the field, and reviews the different types of biomedical data resources and open source tools needed to fully utilize biomedical data. Reades are shown how to navigate through the legal, ethical, and technical hazards of biomedical informatics to become self-sufficient and productive, and to finish with an understanding of how to acquire, organize, annotate, and share biomedical data, how to render confidential data harmless through de-identification, and how to use a variety of free and open source utilities to solve common computational tasks. Berman also discusses how the Perl Language is used in biomedical informatics and provides short Perl scripts that can be applied in the biological research and healthcare settings.