O'Reilly discounts: machine learning, nltk, hadoop, sql, nosql, aws and appeng | Hacker News Reader

O'Reilly discounts: machine learning, nltk, hadoop, sql, nosql, aws and appeng

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77 pointsdrats33 comments

The Programming Collective Intelligence book on sale here is wonderful! If you want to build software that does something intelligent thanks to the mining of a tremendous set of data (think recommendation engine, price models, content classification, search engine, etc) and you're not sure where to start, start with this book. Not being a CS academic, it's hard to find useful, non-trivial introductions that I can understand on these topics. That's where this book excels. It's one of the few technical books I regularly go back to.

Seconded. It's got some minor errors* and omissions, but after reading it for the concepts, I've found other data mining / machine learning books much easier to follow. The explanations are usually pretty good.

* I've been doing the exercises in Lua, and got stuck on one of them - the listed algorithm (IIRC) erroneously ended with "1 - num/denom" rather than "num/denom". It's listed correctly earlier. (I can look up the specifics later, I don't have the book with me.)

Off and on I've been doing the exercises and examples in Clojure, and it's a little difficult because the Python examples seem so imperative to me. It's been a challenge turning them into functional code, there's a couple of places where I go over a list twice when I probably should be able to get all I need with one pass, and of course when I have to resort to using an atom or ref I feel a little dirty.

Thank you, this answers pretty much all the questions I had for the book. Just added to my cart, and now I`m trying to decide on the "MongoDB: The Definitive Guide" book.

Thanks! I'm the author of this book, and it always makes me so happy whenever I read a comment like this on HN :)

I hate to "met too" but I'm a big fan of it as well! I've built a few of the python examples into their perl equivalents over the last few months. Someday I should throw 'em up on github.

I agree that PCI is a great introduction to the field. If you're not sure which tool to use to solve a problem, it's great for pointing you in the right direction. Just a word of warning (@toby, correct me if I'm wrong), but most of the examples are just to give you the idea and to get you started, but aren't expected to work at scale. I'd love to see a followup book on "Optimizing Collective Intelligence".

This will be extremely helpful while reading the book. I hope there will be an updated version in the future, one of the best introductory books I found on this subject.

http://oreilly.com/catalog/errataunconfirmed.csp?isbn=978059...

I'd like to add that Stephen Marsland's 'Machine Learning: An Algorithmic Perspective' is a new book in the same practical/introductory class. The code is mostly numpy.

http://www-ist.massey.ac.nz/smarsland/MLbook.html

I'm sure this is off topic, but as I was previewing the Hadoop book I saw this quote by the creator of Hadoop as to why he choose the name Hadoop:

The name my kid gave a stuffed yellow elephant. Short, relatively easy to spell and pronounce, meaningless, and not used elsewhere; those are my naming criteria. Kids are good at generating such. Googol is a kid's term.

I just see a lot of startups having a hard time finding a decent name, so that seems like a nice piece of advice worth pointing out.

Has anyone read "Data Analysis with Open Source Tools"? http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596802356/ I can't seem to look through the book, not even at Amazon, which I like to do before buying something.

This one is strange. It was just released this month, but without even a table of contents. How are people supposed to decide whether to buy it?

Found the contents here: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/databases/business-intellige...

http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781449389802?portal=oreilly...

Perfect! Thank you very much!

The table of contents is now available on the book's catalog page (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596802356/), and you can view the table of contents and preview snippets of the content on Safari (http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781449389802?portal=oreilly...).

Wait, are these just ebooks or does this stand for the print copy as well? Oddly, the receipt doesn't specify at checkout.

*Edit: Just confirmed, it`s for ebooks only.

Ebooks :(

For personal use, this would be fine, but it's much easier to share paper books at work.

I find that I simply can't use ebooks. Sitting and reading on a computer monitor for long periods of time is just too much strain on my eyes. Funny enough that I don't have as much issue coding all day or reading hackernews.. but if I sit and try to read multi-page articles or ebooks it just seems impossible to do if it isn't on paper.

This is the one thing that tempts me into a Kindle. I wouldn't want to replace my existing books (or stop purchasing new books when available), but an increasing amount of 'long form' content I am interested in seems to be in digital-only format... and self-printing is prohibitively expensive.

Try rotating one of your monitors either by buying a mount from monoprice or going to home depot and hacking something together(i did the latter) reading pdfs and ebooks has been way better, I considered(and had purchased) an ipad to read on, i couldn't justify the larger kindle price. Rotating my monitor for $13(though it is fixed, but reversible(with a screwdriver) made it much easier to live with.

http://imgur.com/dk8q8.jpg

Could you explain what exactly you hacked together to rotate your monitor like that? I was thinking of purchasing a dual monitor mount that allows this configuration, but would rather hack something together for the time being.

Sure, I purchased a bag of #8-32 x 1/2" zinc slot headed bolts, they included the nuts as well.

I also purchased 30 #8 washers(wasn't sure how many i'd need to get the vesa threaded holes tight with the 1/2" long bolt.)

I also purchased a flat 1/8" thick 2" wide by 36" piece of aluminum. I cut it into 3 pieces, used two, drilled 4 holes in each, made those holes slightly larger than the bolt (for wiggle room before tightening down as i didn't measure as well as I should have). I used aluminum even though it was more expensive vs steel because I know drilling steel is a pain in the ass.

I used a piece of paper for the vesa mount hole template, I took the sheet of paper, aligned the center of two vesa mount holes with one of the edges of the paper and marked those with a line (intersect the holes with the edge of the paper and the two lines, that make sense?), the other two i just used a pencil and poked a hole through while laying the paper on the monitor back. I again used the slightly larger drill bit so I didn't have to be ultra precise.

Since I didn't modify the stand at all I can always go back to the standard orientation, it'd take maybe 3 minutes to put it back. Using my method I retained the default stand and have some tilt capability as well.

My marvel of human engineering(the back of the monitor w/ the aluminum attached) http://imgur.com/ZeHvP.jpg

edit: fixed unclosed parenthesis

Same here, I can spend all day working on a computer, but reading on a computer monitor tires my eyes out. I picked up the new standard size kindle, and while it does not do well at all with pdfs, it does a great job with ebooks. The Oreilly ebooks can be downloaded directly in mobi format, so they work very well with the kindle. Overall I've been very happy with reading ebooks on the kindle, and with the $139 price tag, you really can't go wrong. I'm still looking for a good pdf device, but unfortunately the ipad is the best device I've seen yet for pdfs, but its price tag is way too high for me. The ipad does a surprisingly good job of zooming in on columns, something I haven't seen anything else handle well.

I have the smaller kindle and I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of technical ebooks that read nicely on it (they have to be .mobi though as pdf are not nearly as pleasant). I've also found that I now prefer ebooks on my laptop for any exercise heavy reading. For example right now I have half my screen devoted to emacs+slime and the other have to 'land of lisp', I've found this much better than trying to balance a print book and a laptop. I still need/prefer print books in certain situations, but I'm happy with the shelf space this saves. Also don't forget that you permanently have multi-format, drm-free access to O'Reilly ebooks.

Ouch, thanks for mentioning this! I was about to buy 3 without even noticing. I really prefer paper books personally; I'm not sure I'm going to buy as much now.

I bought and read the one on MongoDB which is really great (concise read, to the point, and a learned a lot too). I am currently reading the NLP one and it's a great read too.

Can anyone give reviews on the other ones (for instance the one on data analysis) ?

I bought and read the Collective Intelligence one and enjoyed it. It's a good read.

Agreed. The collective intelligence book has had good reviews from me and others on HN in the past. It's a good intro text with implementable examples.

+1 - I actually already own this one and find it's great as well.

The Hadoop book gives lots of insights into the internals of Hadoop.

But if you want to get started quickly you might be better off just reading a quick guide (http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Li...) and using the Pig console.

The NLP one can be found online, for free, here: http://www.nltk.org/book

Good discount. Also follow http://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/ebookdealoftheday where they discount 50% of a different book everyday.

But still, don't you think the ebooks should be priced way lower? Maybe they are expensive b/c they are drm-free. I know the fixed costs probably cost a lot, and I wonder how much printing a book costs for publishers.

Anybody read the Cassandra book? Just picked it up but I was curious if anybody else had found it to be especially useful.

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