I declared that “Programming Collective Intelligence” was the must have book of 2007 even before I received my copy. I’ve spent the last 2 weeks reading and working through the examples. I am pleased to say that it has lived up to all expectations. The explanations are clear, the examples are relevant and the code is easily re-usable. I’ve tried to read numerous other Machine Learning books and papers only to be confused by the mathematics. “Programming Collective Intelligence” provides a great introduction to Machine Learning in the context of creating social networking application. I’d recommend the book for anybody new to Machine Learning or with a general interest in making their applications a little bit smarter. Machine Learning is a vast and complex field, so be warned that to fully understand the algorithms and implement the latest advances, you’ll need to visit more advanced books and academic papers (Maths, Maths and More Maths).

Project Highlights:

• Building a del.icio.us Link Recommender
• Clustering and Filtering Blog posts based on word usage
• Using Decision Trees to predicting signups
• Use Support Vector Machines for matchmaking
  (…. never thought of using SVM on a dating site … )
• Simplicity of Python libraries used
  (Including the Imaging Library used to draw a Dendrogram and the wrapper for LIBSVM)

Go and buy the book right now!