in reply to RFC: BioInformatics tutorial?
Personally, I'd welcome a bioinformatics tutorial. I made the switch from doing general software development to research bioinformatics two years ago. With zero background in biology or genetics, there was definitely a serious learning curve.
However, many of the problems in bioinformatics are not really that different. Once you get a handle on the terminology and types of problems involved, it's much like any other text mining, data manipulation, or analysis project.
Two books that I found helpful:
In Section
Meditations