Reviews for Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications

The average rating for Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-11-06 00:00:00 Ryan Steinke This is a beginner's guide to machine learning techniques. In typical O'Reilly fashion, there's very little math but lots of code snippets. While you will learn some motivation for using various techniques, you won't be able to start actively using them with just the overviews in this book. There's no chapter on Support Vector Machines, just a section on using libsvm, a library that implements SVM. They said an in-depth discussion of SVM was beyond the scope of the book. I strongly disagree; They do discuss Neural Networks somewhat in-depth and, in my experience, NNs have been abandoned for SVMs so why not seriously discuss SVMs? I would have liked to see the section on Neural Networks and Genetic Programming removed entirely and chapters on input and output choices added as they are really at the heart of what you do day-to-day with machine learning: for most uses of machine learning, it's 90% data munging, 5% algorithms. So overall, I think this book is a good starting place for beginners with no experience in machine learning but they should expect to quickly move on to more advanced books in order to start actually using the techniques touched on in this book. Which brings up one last point: for a beginner's book, there was no bibliography. That was very surprising.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-23 00:00:00 Jon Coolidge 5 years ago, this may have been *the* book for the aspiring Artificial Intelligence practioner. It hasn't held up as well, or maybe I'm just a lazy whiner, but this book requires far more effort than normal. The libraries the code references have since been updated, and in some cases completely rewritten, so the code samples are sometimes out of date in non-obvious ways. The confirmed and uncomfirmed errata must be kept open in your browser at all time. Chapter 12 (the summary) should be read before reading the rest of the book. Most of it won't make sense on the first viewing, but that's the point: you'll have a better feel for what to pay attention to in the other chapters. Recommended for anyone who enjoys programming in Python.