Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications

I bought this book a couple of years ago as machine learning and deep neural networks were becoming the big news in the smart algorithms world, and while it was a bit old even then, the concepts have aged well. I had hoped for a bit more answering of why the more complicated algorithms can be expected to work, but this book was not written for that audience. Instead, it explains when the algorithms can be used, and how to implement and use them appropriately. This is an important thing to know, as well, and the book is much more on the applied than theoretical side.The biggest problem with the book are the incorrect lines of code that pop up every once and a while. This is annoying, and at least one of the errors was incredibly subtle (importing pylab overwrote some of the random functions from the library random). The errata onlin has some helpful answers, but also is full of things that are not.Given the book's age, it also is written with python2. Python3 is much preferred now, and pretty much all of the libraries used in the book are available for python3 (though they sometimes change names). This requires minor translation efforts. The major problem is that many of the API relying on websites on the internet no longer exist. This means some of the exercises are not possible, or you will have to use some other API. Pandas can make up for some of these deficiencies.Overall, I found the book enlightening and am glad it forced me to actually write out and get the code working for myself. Experience is a great teacher and if you go through what's given in the book, you'll solidly understand the basics as well as be able to use many algorithms (genetic algorithms, naive Bayesian classifiers, recommendation methods, optimization, some database ideas) that should be useful in commonly faced problems. I did not go through many of the exercises at the end of the chapters, but most of them are straightforward applications are extensions of the ideas in the book, and seem like they would provide a decent challenge.If you'd like to understand the basics of the above ideas, and have code to use them on data with, then this is a fairly good choice. I would recommend looking around to see if people recommend a newer edition or book with similar ideas, however, since it is a book written over a decade ago. On the other hand, the explanations and figures are helpful and do not over-complicate things.

There's a point every developer hits, that point where everything seems mundane, repetitive and not worth doing anymore. You might go on and try another language to spice up your life, but you then, again, realise same old, same old. You Grab something from the models, do some funky stuff in the business logic and then present. You know what to expect, your know how to do it.This book is for those who realise programming, no matter what language, can do amazing things once you understand some simple concepts to tell a story through data. It gets you out of the mind set of, "I have some data stored here, and I will present it here". Instead, "I have some data stored here, how do I show, create understanding, explore, wedge out, predict, recommend it here"Most of the topics presented in this book are not new in any sense, however they are not old either. They're tried and proven methods for creating meaning from datasets. They will be used for decades to come because they work! There are other books on the topics presented, like I said they are not new, however the simplicity of Python provides a frictionless entry for anyone wanting to get up and running with out a bloated IDE or framework to make it happen.Those who are thinking, "well it's Python, and Python can't do X", I say to you a language does not determine what can and can not do it is the developer. At the end of the day the capability of the developer determines what the language can and can't do. If it seriously can't do something then build an extension to the language! With this thinking you can port what is presented in this book to any language. Python was chosen for it's simple constructs and readability.If you're ever going to by a book on this topic buy this. Not the kindle, but the hard copy. The kindle version I've found doesn't present well for the code sections.Overall this book is a great reference and is also a great primer if wanting to go deeper. It will allow you to tackle your next project with a different mindset and allow your users to discover and learn new things about their online surroundings and themselves!

For AI idiots like myself this was a great and non condescending introduction.Although Python based I found the algorithms clear enough to translate into Erlang without much issue and if you have any functional exposure this should not be difficult.I'm math phobic but this book really generated my interest with its clarity and applicative nature to everyday problems.I took this over the competing CI book as that was heavily Java oriented - why do some people mangle Java to any possible task?The elegance of Python to AI problems really shone through here!Great Book and not too long either - but certainly not short on knowledge!

I really enjoyed following the examplea in this book. I even used some of the code examples for my own peraonal projects for fun and for profit

This book covers algorithms that elsewhere are treated as artificial intelligence, but here are dealt with very rapidly and in a programmer's mindset. It's great to see ideas that have been considered "academic", such as neural networks, treated as no more frightening than other algorithms such as sorting. The description of how to use live web site APIs is also a great feature of this book.

Was one of the first books I read related to Machine Learning - was a lucky guess - it has helped bring me up to speed and made the other books a lot easier to comprehend. Very practical and comprehensive, giving you (the reader) a good grounding in the subject (as a practitioner)

The book is very short, concise, cryptic sometimes and it contains lots of mistakes (in the code and typos in the text content).