A useful guide for the bioinformatics tool builders

This is the article I will recommend to students on the tool-building path and instructors who wish to help them. That's why I was really happy to read this article in PLoS Computational Biology: "A Quick Guide for Developing Bioinformatics Programming Skills." by Joel Dudley and Atul Butte (1).
My favorite parts were the sections on UNIX skills (I love UNIX!), structuring data, and on valuing your time. My only complaints are minor. I thought the comment on SQL statements being peculiar was puzzling. It would also have been nice to see some discussion of HDF5 and BioHDF. This topic would have fit well in both the structuring data and valuing your time sections. BioHDF supports rapid development because it has a hierarchical data model, binary file format, and collection of APIs (2). (BioHDF is an open-source collaboration between The HDF group and Geospiza. You can read more about it here, at www.biohdf.org, and in March in Advances in Computational Biology, part of the book series Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, AEMB, published by Springer).
The best part of the article, though, is the authors get it. They understand what biologists want.
Quoting from the PLoS article:

The success of bioinformatics software is based not on the elegance of the software design, but rather its utility as a tool for driving and answering biological questions. Consequently it is no surprise that many successful bioinformatics apps are written by biologists who lack formal computer science training, as they undoubtedly put scientific utility ahead of architectural elegance and completeness.

This is an important point for aspiring bioinformaticists to remember.