Seeking popular science book on bioinformatics or computational genomics
this is a very broad question so am going to answer it with decent lists found across the internet most of which are sorted by some criteria (eg bestsellers, top review counts, etc). also there are so many bioinformatics books now and one strategy might be to simply go with your favorite publisher. there are some that come up often in CS areas eg O'Reilly. also, even the "x for Dummies" book series has a bioinformatics title which might be of interest to those who like that publisher. another option is to narrow it down by your algorithmic angle eg there is one based on Python and there are others that emphasize other statistical packages, etc.; 

as for your tricky criteria of "inspirational" it may make sense to look for biographies of scientists in the field or stories about successful startups, and if the student is into CS, then programming exercises might verge on "inspirational".


goodreads bioinformatics books ranked by review count &amp; ratings listed
O'Reilly bioinformatics top sellers
Amazon best sellers Bioinformatics
best book on bioinformatics for a computer scientist stackoverflow
suitable book on bioinformatics for cs student biology.se
recommend your favorite bioinformatics books biostars thread