A friend of mine is beginning grad school and has settled upon a lab. The core research within the laboratory is population genomics, and they now need to get up to speed in the area. Taking a class is certainly the start. You can read Haldane’s Sieve to keep up on the literature, which is a necessity if you are doing genomics work, as texts get out of date quickly. Additionally, Graham Coop, Joe Felsenstein and Kent Holsinger have excellent online notes. The upside to this is that they are free. The downside is sometimes you are away from a computer screen. Often a soft intro recommended by many is John Gillespie’s Population Genetics: A Concise Guide, which nicely has a Kindle edition. But if you are going to do graduate level work, I think it is best to just go whole hog. The Gillespie book is appropriate for a quick course or for the undergraduate level, but you really need something as a reference at some point. And for that nothing beats Daniel Hartl and Andrew Clark’s Principles of Population Genetics. There are other texts out there in this area. For example, I have Philip Hedrick’s Genetics of Populations, and Alan Templeton’s Population Genetics and Microevolutionary Theory. For various reasons I would still pick Hartl & Clark if I had to pick.

I also think it’s important to know quantitative genetics, and for that Trudy MacKay and Douglas Falconer’s Introduction to Quantitative Genetics is the best bet in the business that I know of. It’s an excellent complement to Principles of Population Genetics because it starts with pop gen foundations. Derek Roff’s Evolutionary Quantitative Genetics and Michael Lynch and Bruce Walsh’s Genetics and Analysis of Quantitative Traits are probably too specialized for the beginner, and frankly even many steeped in the field haven’t read those books.

There are plenty of other books out there which might suffice in some fashion. In my previous post I mentioned Elements of Evolutionary Genetics. The old John Maynard Smith classic Evolutionary Genetics is also excellent. But if you are working in genomics and want a book less focused on classical methods and geared toward contemporary best practices, then Rasmus Nielsen and Monty Slatkin’s An Introduction to Population Genetics: Theory and Applications is pretty good. It’s a short book, and because it’s in its first edition there are many errors in it. From what I recall it was developed out of notes from a course taught at Berkeley, and it outlines the sort of methods you see in the papers which being published today, utilizing coalescent theory and site frequency spectra. It might be a reasonable quickstart, though I’m not sure it is developed well enough to be a reference (for what it’s worth, I have a copy of it too, and it is being used in graduate level courses here at UC Davis).