Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications (edit title)

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Liked It 1 of 1 members found this review helpful Rated 5 stars “Data-mining is a black box to most people. You read a description of how some method works, then plug the dataset into a program and play with the results. You publish your findings to a PDF and give a hard copy to someone who understands even less. Nothing wrong with this, but you don't...” see full review » see other reviews »

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  • Rated 4 stars

  “Quite good, but easy to the point of being trivial. One can read about any of the methods described in this book elsewhere on the internet and get started in an hour, one doesn't need a book for that.”

  Eugene K wrote this review Saturday, November 7 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No

  
  
  • Rated 4 stars

  “An excellent book on collective algorithms. I wasn't so thrilled that all the examples are written in python, but its better than Java! This book was written in a very friendly voice, which was unexpected for a book about algorithms. Definitely a recommended read in my mind.”

  Derek P. wrote this review Saturday, June 7 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No

  
  
  1 of 1 members found this review helpful

  • Rated 5 stars

  “Data-mining is a black box to most people. You read a description of how some method works, then plug the dataset into a program and play with the results. You publish your findings to a PDF and give a hard copy to someone who understands even less.

  Nothing wrong with this, but you don't really understand the methods until you actually do the calculations. And the power of the analysis is best revealed when you bring your methodology onto the web and open it to the world.

  That's what this book is about. How to analyze data collected from users to generate recommendations (Netflix, Amazon), classify people into groups, etc. The code is Python, which is readable enough even for non-Python folks to understand, and the narrative around the programs is clear and lively, with loads of examples from sites that we all know. Thank you, Toby. And thank you, O'Reilly.”

  Dan A wrote this review Friday, May 9 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No