I’ve only read 6 chapters of Programming Collective Intelligence and I’ve learned more from it than two AI courses at the University of Houston.  The way the subject matter is presented in university courses is dreadful and obfuscated, filled with mathematical theory without any practical examples to make understanding AI more tractable.

This book covers a broad range of topics: optimization, searching, classification and decision trees, all which the author, Toby Segaran, explains in plain English, with very readable code examples that illustrate the application of these concepts to real world problems. 

Toby has done a great job explaining the source code included in this book, they’re very easy to understand.  I’ve never programmed in Python before, but I find myself learning Python using his examples.

In all, I highly recommend this book to all developers interested in machine learning or data mining.

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