Preface

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

— Henry David Thoreau

I have always wanted to write a book. Several things have stopped me, one of which is the pure vanity of the endeavour. Another reason is that I am a poor writer. But probably the main reason was that I simply lacked the discipline required for writing a book, decent or otherwise. Believe it or not, I have actually been asked twice to write a book. The first time was to write a book on machine learning, which I felt (and still feel) inadequate writing. The second time was to write a book on R and bioinformatics, which I actually agreed on writing. However while preparing the structure of the book, I realised that a lot of what I wanted to write about is already freely available. So I dropped the project and decided then that anything I will write in the future will be freely available.

Despite all my reasons, I still want to write because I like writing and I’ll never get better at writing if I don’t write more. Also, I can’t keep waiting for the right moment to write because there isn’t one.

Finally, the title is simply a substitution of the word Dangerous with Bioinformatics from the book The Dangerous Journey by Tove Jansson. It’s a children’s book about a little girl who enters an exciting world full of wacky, wild, and weird things. Kinda like bioinformatics.