The great thing about bioinformatics is that there's so much data available online for free. Here are some links: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ - sequences,

The great thing about bioinformatics is that there's so much data available online for free. Here are some links: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ - sequences, papers, and so much more http://www.expasy.org/ http://smd.stanford.edu/ - microarray data http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/ - not biology related but good data sets to play with R To navigate NCBI databases and learn file formats, you can read their documentation (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/education/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/education/) or get any bioinformatics book.