false 4 0 false false Wed Nov 28 16:50:58 -0800 2007 Wed Jun 25 10:32:52 -0700 2008
There's a few things I liked about it. The most important feature of the book is its breadth. It covers a variety of useful algorithms, from more well known techniques (Baysian filters) to recent developments (support vector machines).

Another thing I liked about this book was the example problems all use real-world datasets. RSS feeds, the Facebook API, and live flight searches are all used in various places.

One excellent feature of the book is the example code builds at each step. Generic algorithms written in earlier chapters are reused or extended in later chapters. In addition to being good software design, this lets the reader see how a concept (e.g. optimization) can be applied in different contexts.

The book makes liberal use of the interactive interpreter to explore the algorithms, and the code itself is fairly readable (though not fantastic). ]]>