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 book - might cover too much
Summary: 3 Stars
Good book - this is very specialized and might cover information that you need. Suggest going over to B&M store to actually take a look before you buy it. Or if you can browse table of contents first either by book searching at amazon or safari.Book Review: Highly Recommend
Summary: 5 Stars
I've always been interested in algorithm development, and was curious to see these creative techniques applied to data mining technologies. The author does a great job presenting complex material in a format that encourages hand-on experimentation in addition to providing an introductory understanding of the subject. The books is divided into chapters which focus on a specific problem, and the author walks you through techniques to solve them, from high level theory to concrete examples, often using data retrieved from online sources. The code samples were easy to follow (even without knowing Python), and numerous instructions and links were provided for libraries, data sources, etc to assist interested readers with creating their own programs or researching topics further. He even includes a summary chapter at the end, reviewing the highlights of each algorithm, along with pros and cons of the method. If you're interested in the subject, this is a good book for your shelf.Book Review: Great Practical and Relevant Examples
Summary: 5 Stars
The basic idea of the book is to show different ways of using user-generated datasets to extract information and make decisions. Each chapter tackles a different problem and shows a few ways to approach it.
To give you an idea of Toby's approach, I'm going to run through my favorite chapter so far, the one on Optimization. The quick description of the problem domain should be familiar to every programmer -- solve NP complete problems like the traveling salesperson. Basically, Optimization techniques can be used in situations where (1) you can't analytically solve the problem (2) the solution set is too large to exhaustively search (3) you can express the cost of a possible solution such that better solutions have a lower cost than worse ones and (4) solutions that are "near" each other have similar values for cost.
Toby's first example is how a family can choose flights so that they arrive at the same airport from all over the country at nearly the same time and depart for home a few days later at nearly the same time. The cost function is a combination of the actual costs of the tickets and the difference in time between the earliest and latest flights. He goes on to provide a dataset of flights, describes setting up optimization problems in general, and shows the python code to implement the cost function.
Then he introduces a few optimization algorithms, implements them, and discusses their relative strengths and weaknesses. The next section applies these techniques to real data on Kayak.com using the standard Python DOM parser, minidom. The final section shows how to apply these techniques to other problems like pairing students in a dorm and network visualization. Other chapters get a similarly exhaustive treatment.
I really hope that this is the future of technical books.
Book Review: One of a kind....put on your thinking cap!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is truly a great book. I am currently learning Python and within minutes, I was running my own web crawler.
I was even able to take the sample code that uses Python (and SQLite) and modify for MySQL.
A few minutes later, I had created over one million records in my database searching for keywords.
Not many books like this so grab it while it's hot!
A+
cbmeeks
Book Review: "Out of the box"!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the best books I've read in the last few years. It has a very natural and easy to follow format, with simple but powerful pieces of code written in Python.
Have you ever wondered how to build a search engine? This book not only explains all the moving parts of a search system, but also builds one with the reader, step-by-step.
It is focused on the web 2.0 arena, but the ideas can be used in many other types of applications.
I highly recommend this book to learn about different techniques and to give you insight of what you can do with information in general.