A nice reading for starters like me is http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n11/full/nbt.2740.html,
which is quite inspiring (there is also extended version in russian).
Among other recommended resources I've found rosalind, which is basically a set of programming problems needed to 'computational biologists' (if you ever saw sites with ICM programs, you can imagine this). The difference here is that you're not submitting a problem, only a solution.
Each time you're trying to pass some problem, new data is generated and you're given 5 minutes or so.
Resources in russian on bioinformatics I found useful so far:
