One of the flaws that Greg found is particularly well described in his review; that the side-trips into data formats distracted readers from learning to program. As someone with a background in medicine, who later learned to program, my attention is always held by biomedical problems, not so much by the programming language. So my primary goal was to describe the common computational problems in biomedicine, and my secondary goal was to show how to approach these problems using Ruby.

Many of the common tasks in biomedicine involve data organization and metadata annotation. I tend to get carried away on these subjects. I also know that skilled programmers who work in biomedicine often have trouble appreciating the basic, recurring problems in their adopted field. I try my best to convince readers of the importance of a class of biomedical problems that are particuarly well-suited to Ruby.