From: lukas.vlcek@gmail.com   
      
   On Jan 19, 1:33 am, egs  wrote:   
   > > I can recommend you one book: Programming Collective Intelligence by   
   > > Toby Segaran.   
   >   
   > mmm... the net is full of enthusiastic reviews, which usually sounds   
   > suspect   
   > can you post an example of a toy problem from the book?   
      
   Imagine you have a online store. This book will show you how to find   
   groups of similar users and then how to make recommendations to users   
   (Amazon like...).   
      
   This book will show you how to write simple search engine (google   
   like) such that you can understand what inverted index is about and   
   how PageRang works. On top of this the book shows you how you can   
   later add another layer into the searching engine such that it can   
   learn from user clicks and propagate certain documents higher in the   
   search results (customized search).   
      
   Document filtering - how to utilize statistics for spam detection...   
   ... etc, etc ... (there are more then clustering, classification and   
   neural nets in this book)   
      
   All the source code for these algorithms are fully presented and   
   explained in the book. It uses Python so the code is very compact.   
   Theoretical background of individual algortihms is explained only to   
   the point so that you can understand the source code (if you really   
   want to dive into statistics then this book is not for you). Most of   
   the algorithms in this book are executed on a real data - which means   
   that it shows you how to download a real data from some public   
   resource, how to preprocess the data and how to execute the algorithm   
   on top of this.   
      
   Regards,   
   Lukas   
      
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