From the website:
Bioinformatics consists of a computational approach to biomedical information management and analysis. It is being used increasingly as a component of research within both academic and industrial settings and is becoming integrated into both undergraduate and postgraduate curricula. The new generation of biology graduates is emerging with experience in using bioinformatics resources and, in some cases, programming skills.
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is one of the world’s premier Web sites for biomedical and bioinformatics research. Based within the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, USA, the NCBI hosts many databases used by biomedical and research professionals. The services include PubMed, the bibliographic database; GenBank, the nucleotide sequence database; and the BLAST algorithm for sequence comparison, among many others.
Although each NCBI resource has online help documentation associated with it, there is no cohesive approach to describing the databases and search engines, nor any significant information on how the databases work or how they can be leveraged, for bioinformatics research on a larger scale. The NCBI Handbook is designed to address this information gap.
An extraordinary resource for learning about bioinformatics information sources.