Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications | Toby Segaran

Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications | Toby Segaran | One of a kind....put on your thinking cap!

books:

Programming Collec...

	Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications Toby Segaran O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2007 - 360 pages average customer review:based on 37 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Great Practical and Relevant Examples

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.

for more information click here

One of a kind....put on your thinking cap!

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

Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications

Excellent book. Most interesting to me was the amount of data
available for free download. Housing prices from zillow. Historical
stock information from Yahoo. etc. This book shows you how easy it
is to download the data and analyse it.

for more information click here

"Out of the box"!!!

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.

for more information click here

Putting Theory into Practice

This book is probably best for those of you who have read the theory, but are not quite sure how to turn that theory into something useful. Or for those who simply hunger for a survey of how machine learning can be applied to the web, and need a non-mathematical introduction.

My area of strength happens to be neural networks (my MS thesis topic was in the subject), so I will focus on that. In a few pages of the book, the author describes how the most popular of all neural networks, backpropagation, can be used to map a set of search terms to a URL. One might do this, for example, to try and find the page best matching the search terms. Instead of doing what nearly all other authors will do, prove the math behind the backprop training algorithm, he instead mentions what it does, and goes on to present python code that implements the stated goal.

The upside of the approach is clear -- if you know the theory of neural networks, and are not sure how to apply it (or want to see an example of how it can be applied), then this book is great for that. His example of adaptively training a backprop net using only a subset of the nodes in the network was interesting, and I learned from it. Given all the reading I have done over the years on the subject, that was a bit of a surprise for me.

However, don't take this book as being the "end all, be all" for understanding neural networks and their applications. If you need that, you will want to augment this book with writings that cover some of the other network architectures (SOM, hopfield, etc) that are out there. The same goes for the other topics that it covers.

In the end, this book is a great introduction to what is available for those new to machine learning, and shows better than any other book how it applies to Web 2.0. Major strengths of this book are its broad coverage, and the practicality of its contents. It is a great book for those who are struggling with the theory, and/or those who need to see an example of how the theory can be applied in a concise, practical way.

To the author: I expect this book will get a second edition, as the premise behind the book is such a good one. If that happens, perhaps beef up the equations a bit in the appendix, and cite some references or a bibliography for those readers interested in some more in depth reading about the theory behind all these wonderful techniques. (The lack of a bibliography is why I gave it 4 stars out of 5, I really think that those who are new to the subject would benefit greatly from knowing what sits on your bookshelf.)

for more information click here

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8

products you might be interested in