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Comment by StClaire | Hacker News Reader

I bought this book awhile ago and I can't recommend it enough. My machine learning club will go though this starting in January.

Is this part of a Christmas season special, or do they regularly do giveaways? And do they send emails about the free book of the day?

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They give away one book per day. They don't send an email, but I have a script that scrape their site and send myself an email. I'm happy to add to a mailing list if there's interest.

I'd join that list!

A site that's pretty good at that is Change Detection [1]. You even get daily emails and change logs for free.

[1]: https://www.changedetection.com/

Thanks for the tip. I just implemented it and it said 44 other people are monitoring that page haha.

Just a thought.. instead of building something that sends out an email... it would be much more convenient to build something that automatically adds each new book to your account.. using something like Python's Selenium library to do it.

Seems like the kind of stuff you get at by combining sklearn's official docs with some material from one of the moocs (like udacity's machine learning class, coursera's etc.) + some wikipedia. This is my default style of learning: picking a "track" (whatever mooc or a cool side project idea) + lots of small specific resources.

I'm really curious why would you recommend and actual book?

It has all the chances to get outdated in a few months, while the separate resources will get updated for sure. yeah, there's some googling effort, but still...

Most (all? I can't remember exactly) of it doesn't use Scikit-learn. You actually implement the algorithms yourself and see what happens under the hood

I randomly browsed and got to some sklearn code snippet. great, then I'll definitely dig deeper into it!

I just got this book ~2 weeks ago and am using it in conjunction with udacity's course. Python Machine Learning (PML) is more low-level, math intensive, and hands on than udacity and other resources I'm using.

Thus far Udacity's course fits your explanation of using sklearn docs, tweaking inputs, etc. while PML provides a technical explanation of weighting with perceptrons and then you hand-write a perceptron learning algorithm.

Books are able to dig into a single topic deeply in a connected way with a single author's voice who can assume at any point all the given knowledge from the previous chapters. It is possible to learn from many shallow or specific sources, but it's not as easy/much more effort for most.

> Is this part of a Christmas season special, or do they regularly do giveaways?

I specifically remember them doing something like "20 books in 20 days" at the end of the last year, where you could get one book per day.

Seems like that run was quite successful and that they are doing it regularly now. I have like 21 books in my account without actually buying any of them.

EDIT: Correction, I've just checked my order history and it turns out that giveaway I was referring to was at the end of 2014, not 2015.

I've heard good things about two books: this one and one on Postges.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933716

Free ebooks are every day. Normally it's something older. No Email notifications for the freebies normally. Worth checking up on occasionally though.

Check my comment above [1] if you want email notifications. It'll work unless this site blocks robots on the giveaway page.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13107226

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