Adam's review
Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran
This book is a survey of machine learning algorithms useful for tasks like spam filters and recommendation engines. It's a great book if you're a practicing programmer that want to get thing done, less great if you're looking for a deep exploration of a particular topic.
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 conte...more
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 conte...more
