Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $22.00 You Save: $17.99 (45%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $21.39 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications
Book Review: Very helpful
Summary: 5 Stars
Wow! This has been a great read. I have been interested in neural networks and machine learning for awhile now, but I was unsure of where to start. The author's writing style is easy to follow. The examples have been very helpful. The only complaint I have is that one of the URL's, given in the book, is broken. Otherwise, I would highly recommend the book to anyone interested in this subject matter.Book Review: Understanding the logic behind sites like Amazon and Google...
Summary: 5 Stars
Have you ever wondered how some of those "collective intelligence" sites work? How Amazon can suggest books that you'll like based on your browsing history? How a search engine can rank and filter results? Toby Segaran does a very good job in revealing and teaching those types of algorithms in his book Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications. While I'm not ready to run out and build my own version of Facebook now, at least I can start to understand how sites like that are designed.
Contents:
Introduction to Collective Intelligence; Making Recommendations; Discovering Groups; Searching and Ranking; Optimization; Document Filtering; Modeling with Decision Trees; Building Price Models; Advanced Classification - Kernel Methods and SVMs; Finding Independent Features; Evolving Intelligence; Algorithm Summary; Third-Party Libraries; Mathematical Formulas; Index
In each of the chapters, Segaran takes a type of capability, be it decision-making or filtering, and shows how a programming language can be used to build that feature. His examples are all in Python, so it helps if you are already familiar with that language if you want to actually work with the code. But even if you don't know Python, the examples are clear and detailed enough that you can follow along and get the gist of what's happening. I personally think that it would help immensely if you had a background in mathematics and statistics. You can use the code here without having a detailed understanding of math, but I'm sure much of this would be more deeply appreciated if you already know about such things as Tanimoto similarity scores, Euclidean distances, or Pearson coefficients.
From my perspective (a non-Python programmer *without* the math background), I was more interested in understanding the overall picture about things like how ranking systems work or how recommendation engines are structured. While there was more detail than I needed (or understood), I still felt as if I accomplished my goal. I have a much greater appreciation for what companies like Google and Amazon have done in building web applications that allow the knowledge and wisdom of groups to be gathered and applied to my own preferences.
Statistical programmers will probably find years of entertainment here. :) "Normal" programmers will expand their horizons, too.
Book Review: "Programming Collective Intelligence" - a winner
Summary: 5 Stars
Web 2.0 is everywhere. When you log into Amazon or Netflix or del.icio.us you'll see sites that know a lot about you and can recommend choices based on past history. The machinery for accomplishing this is nicely laid out in "Programming Collective Intelligence". The math isn't strenuous, but the implications can be profound.
My preference might have been to see examples written in Java, but I've come to appreciate the author's choice of Python. It's been a good motivator for exposing myself to a new language. The code has the virtue of being succinct. I've seen ports to Scheme and JavaScript on the web.
The book is generating some fair buzz. I recommend it highly.
Book Review: The imagination and the software
Summary: 5 Stars
Since I have my first computer, this machine is highly related with the use of my imagination and this make me happy. With this book I rediscover this relation, so I only thinking about looking for time to transform those mental images in to programs.Book Review: One of the BEST book I've read for last 10 years
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought lots of books on the field of machine learning, but it was hard to understand when it goes deeper with lots of mathmatics. Even though I understand the concept, I had no idea how to implement it.
After reading this book, all the theories that I've been struggling with became very clear. Toby did a great job to explain these tough topics with proper graphics and easy examples.
This book is one of the best book I've ever read for last 10 years (in several hundreds books).