Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications | 
 enlarge | Author: Toby Segaran
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
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Rating:  36 reviews
Sales Rank: 6354
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Pages: 360
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 0.7
ISBN: 0596529325
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.76
EAN: 9780596529321
ASIN: 0596529325
Publication Date: August 16, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 31 more reviews...
 A visionary book that illuminates the Internet October 21, 2008
Alexey I. Smirnov (Finland)
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 media content - with bright images, cool videos, wow-type web pages.
However, I often discover news that I wish I found out earlier. In other words, there are so many news sources that reading them all or just looking at the headlines of major blogs will take too much time. We need targeted information delivery service.
This is the main idea of this book. In fact, it starts with explaining how to make recommendations given a set of preferences of a number of people and your own preferences. What are those cool things that you have not tried out yet but everybody else did? The example described in the book is applied to Delicious which does not offer recommendations yet.
I often try to decide what my interests are. The blogs that I am reading might answer this question if one builds groups of them. In fact, I have done this manually, but I found out that this categorization is not perfect. The book answers this question in Chapter 3.
After that the book deviates into a number of additional topics such as search, neural networks, discrete optimization. The author Toby Segaran has a great ability to explain difficult concepts using simple words and pictures. As most of the stuff was familiar to me I was wondering how easy a new concept seemed and how much time I spent originally understanding it.
After that the main melody of the book is there again - the next chapter explains how to filter documents, for example to decide if a particular news story is interesting to you or not. Then the book deviates again into decision trees and building price models and even matching people on a dating site. However, there comes our melody again - this time it explains how to extract trends from a lot of news sources, that is decide what people are discussing today. This feature is similar to Google News except that the user has no control of news sources.
I was surprised when I found out that Python is such a popular language in a scientific community. The book describes lots of libraries dealing with numerical data or displaying various charts. The book will serve as a great introduction to Python language even though there are lots of introductory books available. In fact, learning Python this way it easier and more enjoyable.
After reading the book I definitely want to try out the tricks explained there and improve my information soup. This book is my virtual cookbook.
 Not worth the money October 13, 2008
Vladislav Skvortsov (Mountain View, CA, USA)
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
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 on that, but you'll need to read a more comprehensive source if you intend to really implement it.
I was quite disappointed with the book. I guess it might be ok for a junior developer to get a feel of what that all is about. If you've ever come up with an algorithm by looking at a mathematical description of the approach, you don't need this book at all; you can write a similar one yourself.
An Eye Openning Inspiring Book August 25, 2008
Orlin Todorov (Los Angeles, CA USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
Wow July 21, 2008
Dave C. Williford
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
 good but no great June 12, 2008
Oliver (NC, US)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
most people have shared their thoughts on the good of this book. I like to point out some of the bad as I read through:
- first, too many typos - both the author and oreilly should do a better job on proof read the materials. the typos are so much that it can easily wreck otherwise good materials.
- second, arcane solution and coding style. Many first step to the solution of machine learning is to represent the problem at hand well. The author's brain apparently wired different from mine so the opinion is personal. For example: chapter 5 on "optimization for preference", he chose to represent a solution as vector form like [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0], there is no way I can relate this solution to the real meaning (you want to allocate 10 students into 5 rooms each with two slots) - if there is an easy explanation, the book didn't say so.
thus the 3 star. I believe a second edition is warranted and should be much better.
just my 2c.
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