I tend to read a lot of books , and most of them have a technical focus. Every once and awhile, I run across a gem that is timely, coherent, unique, and well written. Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran is one of those books. If you've ever wanted to understand how search engines perform their magic, how a site like Amazon.com knows what products to recommend, how spam detection works, and how dating sites predict good matches (among others), this book is for you. Check out Toby's Web 2.0 Berlin slides for a quick overview. Many of the algorithms and methods that Toby describes are very complex, but he doesn't assume that you have any special knowledge of data analysis, machine learning, or statistics. Toby does a fantastic job explaining mathematical concepts in a remarkably straightforward and simple fashion. If you have a programmers understanding of math, you should do just fine. The book is full of real-world examples that pull live Read More...