Teaching bioinformatics to students from diverse academic backgrounds presents a number of pedagogical challenges, particularly in short, intensive courses. Here we present a digital book built using the Quarto publishing system as a supplementary teaching tool, for the course Bioinformatics and the Treatment of Data, part of the Official Master's in Advanced Biotechnology at the University of Málaga (UMA) and Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (UNIA).

The book integrates narrative text, executable code, and visual outputs across multiple chapters aligned with the structure of the course, which includes topics such as command-line tools, R programming, network analysis, RNA-Seq, genetic variation, BLAST, phylogenetics, and synthetic biology.

By shifting core instructional content from lecture slides to the digital book, the lecturers can focus class time on conceptual understanding and problem-solving activities. Students receive access to the material before the course, allowing them to prepare in advance and use the resource during practicals for reference and troubleshooting.

In this presentation, we describe the implementation of the digital book, its structure and interactive features, and its integration into both postgraduate and undergraduate teaching. Preliminary observations suggest improvements in student autonomy and classroom dynamics, and we outline plans to assess its impact on student outcomes in future iterations. This approach demonstrates how reproducible, open-source publishing tools can enhance teaching and learning in data-intensive fields such as bioinformatics.

Keywords: Markdown, digital book, bioinformatics, Quarto.