Recommended Books

If you click on the image or the link, you go to Amazon. If you buy it I get a percentage. I own all these books and recommend them.

Light Bedtime Reading

The Numerati This is a great book. I listened to the audio version on a drive between Virginia and New Mexico. It was riveting and kept me awake. I talk about this book in chapter 1. If you want some light reading on how data mining is being used, this is it.

Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart This book is similar to The Numerati mentioned above. This book may be a bit more technical but still is a quick easy read about current trends in data mining, written in an engaging style. If you are interested in data mining it is worth your while to read one of these books.

No Place to Hide
The underbelly of data mining. “You are being watched. Government agencies and private corporations know where you live, what you buy, and what you read.” eeks. For only $5.50 this is a bargain.

Python

Dive Into Python 3 This is THE BOOK to get if you are an experienced programmer and want to learn about Python. It is also available for free online at http://diveintopython3.org/. (Based on the Amazon reviews of the shoddiness of the physical book–go with the online version.) I mention this book in chapter 6 when I talk about grabbing data from twitter using the httplib2 and json libraries.

Data Mining Textbooks

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

I have used this textbook for several intro to data mining courses I taught. The book uses the Weka open source data mining toolkit, which is a great way to explore different data mining algorithms. The book is fairly easy compared to other data mining textbooks and it is also inexpensive compared to other textbooks.

Introduction to Data Mining
This is a serious data mining textbook that will teach you the math behind the algorithms. I use this book as a reference. If I want to know more about an approach I check out what these authors say.

Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications

I used this book for an intro to data mining course I taught. It’s a practical Python-based book on recommendation and other systems. The students in the course liked the book a lot. On the other hand there was a fair amount of frustration with the book. There were numerous errors in the Python code and–no fault of the author– the apis of some of the web services changed. Of all the books listed here, this one is most similar to A Programmer’s Guide to Data Mining.

Machine Learning
I bought a copy of this short book a long time ago; read it stem to stern; and still use it as a reference. It is dense but clear. The only thing negative I can say about it is that it is expensive.

Miscellaneous

The Manga Guide to Statistics (Manga Guide to Science)
I talk about this book in chapter 4. It’s a great book–We follow the manga character Rui as she learns basic statistics. If you want to brush on on statistics this is a pretty entertaining way to do it.