12-Month Bioinformatics Programming Roadmap
Month 1: Python Basics
• Variables, data types, and basic operations
• Lists, dictionaries, sets, and tuples
• Control flow: if statements, loops
• Functions and scoping
• File I/O: reading/writing text and CSV
Month 2: Python Intermediate
• Modules and packages; creating your own modules
• Virtual environments (venv/Conda)
• Exception handling (try/except)
• Basic testing with unittest or pytest
Month 3: Python Advanced
• Object-oriented programming (classes, inheritance)
• Decorators and context managers
• Concurrency: threading, multiprocessing, asyncio
• Performance profiling and optimization
Month 4: Python Data Handling & Visualization
• NumPy arrays and operations
• Pandas DataFrame: creation, indexing, grouping, merging
• Data cleaning and transformation
• Matplotlib & Seaborn: basic plotting
Month 5: Linux & Command Line
• File system navigation (ls, cd, cp, mv)
• Text processing with grep, awk, sed
• Shell scripting basics (Bash loops, variables)
• Software installation and package management
Month 6: Data Structures & Algorithms I
• Arrays & lists in Python and R
• String processing and regular expressions
• Searching and sorting algorithms
• Complexity analysis (Big-O notation)
Month 7: Data Structures & Algorithms II
• Trees and graphs fundamentals
• Dynamic programming (Needleman–Wunsch, Smith–Waterman)
• Suffix arrays/trees overview
• Algorithm optimization
Month 8: R Basics & Tidyverse
• R syntax: vectors, matrices, data frames
• Writing functions in R
• Data manipulation with dplyr and tidyr
• Working with factors and handling missing data
Month 9: R Visualization & Statistics
• ggplot2: grammar of graphics
• Descriptive statistics and distributions
• Hypothesis testing (t-tests, chi-squared)
• Regression analysis and multiple testing correction
Month 10: Biological File Formats & Parsing
• FASTA and FASTQ parsing with Biopython
• SAM/BAM handling with pysam or Rsamtools
• VCF reading and filtering
• GFF/GTF and BED file manipulation
Month 11: Bioinformatics Tools & Libraries
• Biopython and scikit-bio
• Bioconductor essentials (DESeq2, edgeR, GenomicRanges)
• Command-line tools: BLAST, HMMER, BWA, SAMtools
• Introduction to Docker/Singularity for environments
Month 12: Workflows & Best Practices
• Version control with Git and GitHub
• Modular coding and documentation
• Environment management (Conda, renv)
• Pipeline managers: Snakemake and Nextflow
• Reproducible analysis and testing