{"id":1063,"date":"2012-08-30T19:44:36","date_gmt":"2012-08-30T09:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/?p=1063"},"modified":"2014-06-10T22:02:24","modified_gmt":"2014-06-10T12:02:24","slug":"programming-collective-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/?p=1063","title":{"rendered":"Programming Collective Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/shop.oreilly.com\/product\/9780596529321.do\" target=\"_blank\">This book<\/a> has taken me longer to read than just about any other technology book, but I&#8217;ll come back to that.<\/p>\n<p>The premise of this book is that machine learning has become an integral part of modern applications, from Amazon&#8217;s product recommendations through Google&#8217;s pagerank and on to decision making, filtering and clustering and a few others in between. Basically a range of different approaches to extracting meaning from data. Each chapter covers a different technique from a very practical angle: you actually build an implementation of the algorithm in question.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>These topics could easily ascend into a theoretical discussion, but the author does a surprisingly good job at keeping things practical and grounded, and therein lies the reason I&#8217;ve been reading this book for several months. He keeps it so practical and interesting I&#8217;ve felt compelled to actually build every example. Along the way I&#8217;ve gone from having a fairly dusty Python knowledge to being very comfortable in the language, an unexpected side benefit.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not easy to make a discussion about an algorithm interesting. <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.boyet.com\/\">Julian Bucknall<\/a>, both in his columns in The Delphi Magazine and now <a href=\"http:\/\/pcplus.techradar.com\/\">PC Plus<\/a>, and also his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boyet.com\/FixedArticles\/DADSBook.html\" target=\"_blank\">Algorithms and Data Structures<\/a> book, is still probably my favourite, however Toby Segaran does a pretty effective job as well.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t buy this is you want a high level tour of machine learning. However if you really want a deeper understanding and you&#8217;re prepared to roll your sleeves up and write code in order to get it, potentially learning a new language along the way, I can thoroughly recommend this book. Just don&#8217;t expect to read much else for a little while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This book has taken me longer to read than just about any other technology book, but I&#8217;ll come back to that. The premise of this book is that machine learning has become an integral part of modern applications, from Amazon&#8217;s product recommendations through Google&#8217;s pagerank and on to decision making, filtering and clustering and a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[88,67,87],"class_list":["post-1063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-algorithms","tag-ebooks","tag-python"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1063"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1549,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063\/revisions\/1549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}