Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications
Book Review: Good overview of topic, but assumes you must learn Python
Summary: 3 Stars
This book provides an good collection of the various algorithms that can be used in this brave new world of Web 2.0. However, I have found it difficult to use as it has all its code written in Python, a language I know little about. It seems to me that if the algorithms were explained in detail beforehand, rather than having to be worked out from the code, this would be a superb book.
Given the type of analysis this book uses, the language could be either Java (as that pervades everywhere), PHP (the language of server scripting), or (even better) Lisp, which Python attempts to emulate.
It talks about making use of the various APIs that are now available, letting you access data that can be manipulated. But it does not show how the data looks before the programs modify them, so if you want (as I do) to use a different language, you cannot see from what you need to modify, only the result.
Don't get me wrong, this is a good book, but the Python code is poorly laid out (never heard of spaces? And if you have to use spaces to indent, try three spaces), and for those like me who don't read Python it was difficult to see what is going on. I don't want to learn Python just to learn the algorithms. I would, perhaps perversely, be prepared to plough through Lisp code, and it would be good to see the Python code converted to Lisp (and Java for that matter).
So yes, this is an interesting book as it describes areas of interest, given the new types of data that are widely available, but I only give it three stars because it seems to be written for Python users, not the general programming audience.