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

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.76
EAN: 9780596529321
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 0596529325
Label: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 360
Publication Date: August 16, 2007
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Sales Rank: 4475
Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc.

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it. Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general -- all from information that you and others collect every day. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application. This book explains: Collaborative filtering techniques that enable online retailers to recommend products or media Methods of clustering to detect groups of similar items in a large dataset Search engine features -- crawlers, indexers, query engines, and the PageRank algorithm Optimization algorithms that search millions of possible solutions to a problem and choose the best one Bayesian filtering, used in spam filters for classifying documents based on word types and other features Using decision trees not only to make predictions, but to model the way decisions are made Predicting numerical values rather than classifications to build price models Support vector machines to match people in online dating sites Non-negative matrix factorization to find the independent features in adataset Evolving intelligence for problem solving -- how a computer develops its skill by improving its own code the more it plays a game Each chapter includes exercises for extending the algorithms to make them more powerful. Go beyond simple database-backed applications and put the wealth of Internet data to work for you. 'Bravo! I cannot think of a better way for a developer to first learn these algorithms and methods, nor can I think of a better way for me (an old AI dog) to reinvigorate my knowledge of the details.' -- Dan Russell, Google 'Toby's book does a great job of breaking down the complex subject matter of machine-learning algorithms into practical, easy-to-understand examples that can be directly applied to analysis of social interaction across the Web today. If I had this book two years ago, it would have saved precious time going down some fruitless paths.' -- Tim Wolters, CTO, Collective Intellect

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- A visionary book that illuminates the Internet
This is a visionary book because it predicts a lot of what will happen to the Internet soon. How do we process information in the Internet age? Instead of reading magazines and newspapers we use blogs as our source of news. This is because blogs offer much more customized news feed. In a typical newspaper, how much of its content is of interest to a reader? I guess half is a big value but typically it is less than that.

I start my working day with consuming two sweet drinks. One drink is a cup of coffee. Another is a virtual information soup made of 100 blogs. I glance over most of the stories quickly using Google Reader and select those that I am interested in. I might read them in greater detail later on during the day, in the evening, or on a weekend. I do not know which drink gives me more pleasure - the delicious cup of coffee or sweet virtual soup. I like the latter a lot because it is rich with ... Read More

Rating:

- Not worth the money
In short: this book isn't worth its price.

The major part of the volume of the book is code and corresponding explanations. If the reader is a decent programmer, he can actually figure it all out by himself given algorithms. Otherwise it makes more sense to get a book on data structures, or Python, or general algorithm construction and learn the basics there.

The algorithms/methods presented in this book are not really specific to "collaborative intelligence" (with a couple of exceptions). The author gives a brief overview of the techniques and then dives into great details on how to implement it. In reality unless you are working on a toy site, you don't really need that code, since it wouldn't scale or fit the production environment. You'll need the math model / algorithm to come up with reasonable implementation. However, it's exactly what the book is missing. Well, it gives *some* info ... Read More

Rating:

- An Eye Openning Inspiring Book
I got more from this book than I have from any other book I read in the past couple of years!
It covers in a streamlined form a huge array of algorithms powering the contemporary web - from recomendation engines to a search engine that includes as one of its features the Google PageRank algorithm, to some quite recent AI innovations.
Just about the only area that was not covered was statistical machine translation. I wish he had done that, since that is my favourite subject.
It helps you see the world through the "Collective Intelligence opportunities" prism.

Rating:

- Wow
If you are interested in this topic, you should read this book. Disclaimer: I am new to the topic but appreciate when it is done well and need to understand how to implement it for my job. I was blown away by both the conceptual coverage and the implementation details. This book will allow you to cover the concepts on a first pass then come back and actually build the approaches you are most interested in. Even if you ultimately use a vendor product for recommendation, you will understand the algorithms being used and their proper application and where they are deficient.

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