$ tommy --field-guide --free-sampler
What they don't teach you in bioinformatics
290 hard-won lessons — the best of three years of daily posts, distilled. The judgment no course teaches, from a wet-lab biologist who became a Big Pharma bioinformatics director. Get 15 of them, free, today.
From the author of From Cell Line to Command Line · 1,000+ copies sold · 140K+ follow the work.
✓ Free 15-lesson sampler, across all 13 chapters ✓ Founding-reader access this November ✓ No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
01 — the gap
You can run the pipeline. But is the result right?
Every course teaches the tools: Seurat, DESeq2, the Unix commands. Almost none teach the part that separates a bioinformatician from a button-pusher: judgment.
The sanity checks. The paranoia. The biological common sense that catches the error a p-value never will. That knowledge is tacit. You earn it over a decade of getting burned, or you borrow it from someone who already did.
! Excel silently corrupted your gene symbols — SEPT9 became a date.
! Your UMAP looks like clean clusters. It's lying to you.
! The “batch effect” you ignored is your whole result.
! “Analyze this RNA-seq data” — the prompt that wastes an afternoon.
Catch these yourself, and you stop outsourcing judgment on your own data — and finally trust your own results.
This is the field guide I wish someone had handed me on day one.
— Ming “Tommy” Tang · Director of Bioinformatics
02 — what's coming this november
One book. 13 chapters. 290 lessons.
For three years I posted every day (1000 day streak!). Then I pulled the best of 1,000+ posts, distilled a decade of hard-won judgment into 290 lessons, and organized them into 13 chapters — so you get the gold without scrolling three years of my feed. You get it in both a beautifully illustrated edition and a fully searchable one.
01 Learning & Getting Started 25 lessons
02 Programming & Math Basics 11 lessons
03 Craft & Good Practice 28 lessons
04 Career & Collaboration 10 lessons
05 Unix & Command Line 49 lessons
06 Reproducibility & Workflows 34 lessons
07 Visualization 11 lessons
08 RNA-seq 14 lessons
09 Single-Cell & Spatial 17 lessons
10 Genomics & Variants 29 lessons
11 Statistics, Artifacts & Pitfalls 36 lessons
12 AI & Claude Code 12 lessons
13 Drug Development & Clinical 14 lessons
290 lessons · 13 chapters · 2 editions (illustrated + searchable) · wet lab → Big Pharma
03 — your free sampler
15 of the best lessons, sampled across all 13 chapters.
No fluff, no drip-feed. Enter your email and you get a curated 15-lesson sampler drawn from all 13 chapters, pulled straight from the book. The same illustrated pages, so you can judge the real thing before it's for sale. A taste of what's inside:
› I Regret Not Learning Linear Algebra in College
› The Myth of Push-Button Bioinformatics
› How Excel Corrupts Your Gene Symbols
› Sixty Unix One-Liner Challenges
› How UMAP Can Mislead Your Interpretation
› Why No Bioinformatics Analysis Is Quick
› Why Genome Builds Matter
› Writing Claude Code Prompts That Actually Work
› The Batch Effect That Was the Whole Result
› Why In Vitro Success Needs DMPK
your free sampler
Ready? Get 15 lessons, free.
Sampled across all 13 chapters, straight from the book. No drip-feed, no wait.
04 — who's writing this
“I tackled de novo genome assembly, heatmaps and variant analysis on my own — and realized bioinformatics might just be my thing.”
— Dr. Jingling Li, reader of From Cell Line to Command Line
› Director of Bioinformatics in Big Pharma
› Boston Business Journal 40 Under 40 (2026)
› 140,000+ scientists follow the work · 30M+ yearly impressions
› 1,000+ bought the first book, From Cell Line to Command Line
› Author of the Chatomics blog · 230+ tutorials
Came to the US with $2,000 and a wet-lab PhD. Couldn't open a 2GB file in Excel. Taught myself to fix that, and spent the next decade learning what the courses leave out.
Ming “Tommy” Tang — Connect with me on LinkedIn ↗
05 — founding readers
Get on the list now. Get the best of everything.
When the cart opens this November, the people on this list come first — at the lowest price it will ever be, with bonuses no one else gets.
01 The free 15-lesson sampler — today, the instant you join, sampled across all 13 chapters.
02 The founding-reader price — the lowest this book will ever sell for, before it rises to $149.
03 Founding-only bonuses
- My complete first book From Cell Line to Command Line ($59.99),
- A 3-hour hands-on data visualization workshop using ggplot2 and ComplexHeatmap for real genomics data and single-cell data. ($149),
- A 1-hour Claude Code course showing you how to build your website with AI. This is the first advice I always give to the job seekers. ($149)
- If you have bought my first book, you will get a secret bonus when the new book lanuches.
ALL FREE.
04 A 7-day, keep-everything guarantee — the same promise 1,000+ readers already trusted.
Joining costs nothing and commits you to nothing. It just puts you at the front of the line.