[ampdepolymerase]

Most of the pop sci books are useless for practical use cases, and similarly the Feynman lectures self select for the physics/mathematically inclined.

Biology is a leaky abstraction, it's very hard to do anything with rigor without having a strong foundation in the fundamentals. You see the same discussion on hacker news when it comes to music, people are more interested in mapping programming concepts to music notation and complaining about western music presentation than the music itself. For biology, you need need to have a firm understanding of the central dogma and biochemistry if you want to do anything beyond surface level empirical trial and error. Most people, especially the "hacker types", only have a vague understanding of the former i.e. DNA translation and transcription and that's about the limit. You absolutely have to gain an intuition for biochemistry if you want to do things with rigor, otherwise you will just be the biotech equivalent of a bootcamp web developer, fit for washing test tubes and not much else.

[MajimasEyepatch]

Absolutely right. These basic concepts like the central dogma aren't especially hard to learn, but it's important to really understand them deeply if you want anything to make sense.

Among textbooks, Molecular Biology of the Gene by James Watson et al. is a good starting point to understand the central dogma: DNA -> RNA -> Protein. Likewise Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts et al. for cell biology.

An Introduction to Systems Biology by Uri Alon is good for the more mathematically inclined once you're ready to get more advanced, though you should really have a solid grasp on the fundamentals of molecular and cellular biology first.

None of this is for the faint of heart, but it's not especially difficult either. It's unfortunate that it's hard to get hands-on experience with biology once you've graduated from college, which helps a lot to connect the dots, but there are still plenty of great resources out there.

[kaiwen1]

Molecular Biology of the Cell is one of my all-time favorite books. Read it 15 years ago, rereading it now in the 7th (newest) edition. If someone has read the books you've listed, done the exercise and has a comprehensive understanding of the material, but no biology degree, only a passion for learning about cell biology, are there job options to keep feeding that passion?

[ampdepolymerase]

Work/volunteer as a minimum wage software developer lab rat (or whatever your day job speciality is). There are plenty of labs that are in need of free labor when it comes to software/engineering support in general, just ask around.

[MajimasEyepatch]

If you're an experienced software developer, you can also just get a job as a software developer at any number of companies in pharma and biotech. No need to do it for free.

[BlueTemplar]

> the central dogma: DNA -> RNA -> Protein

Funny thing : having never seen the term "central dogma" before, I looked it up, and Wikipedia says that this one (directly calling out your reference) is an incorrect version, in fact has been proven wrong in the last decades, while the original Central Dogma holds.

Even funnier thing : I kind of lied : I saw that term for the first time two weeks ago... when watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. Where it's a location. But then I guess it also throws around terms like "apoptosis" (which I did knew and which made me raise an eyebrow) as sciencey sounding words (still somewhat appropriate to the context in a metaphorical way), so of course it couldn't resist "Central Dogma" as a play on words between biology, location, and (anti-) "Orientalization" of Christianity !

[MajimasEyepatch]

The Wikipedia article is correct in a pedantic way, but for all practical purposes, DNA -> RNA -> Protein is the place to start. Then you layer on the myriad complications that have evolved over four billion years.