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Comment by kurtosis | Hacker News Reader

I just got it in the mail yesterday, and after a first reading I am really impressed. Most of the published material on these topics is academic and heavily mathematical. This type of practical guide is very useful. The things that I like the most so far:

1) The examples are real python code, and many chapters the code samples are small enough that you can follow the text by typing the code into an interpreter to try it out

2) He doesn't just test algorithms on standard datasets like MNIST or MovieLens - He gives programming examples for how to extract your own datasets e.g. by showing how to use the eBay api to download prices from eBay, or how to use the facebook api.

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after a first reading I am really impressed. Most of the published material on these topics is academic and heavily mathematical.

To each his own - I thought this book could easly be condensed into a list of mathematical theorems - a page worth of links to wikipedia.

1) The examples are real python code

Really crappy python code... definitely not the kind of code one should be looked at as example.

He doesn't just test algorithms on standard datasets like MNIST or MovieLens - He gives programming examples for how to extract your own datasets e.g. by showing how to use the eBay api to download prices from eBay, or how to use the facebook api.

He combines math theory with code and API's? What's the point of that?

If you want to learn how to code python, read a python book. If you want to learn math, read a math book. If you want to learn API's, read the API docs. If you want to learn all three, read all three, but don't think that you know any of them if you see a bunch of badly coded examples of the results of knowing them.

I agree with you about the non idomatic python code - It reminds me of my earliest attempts at python after switching from matlab. I saw a lot of criticism that PCI should have been done in pseudocode and I wonder if the book's coding style was a deliberate attempt to satisfy this complaint.

I think that any maturing field needs a hierarchy of explanations that go progressively deeper into the subject - the explanations of the second law of thermodynamics that you get in freshman chemistry course are superficial compared to what you would deal with in a graduate course, but this doesn't mean that chem101 should be taught at the grad level, or that it is pointless to teach freshmen about the second law. The real danger is if you lie or misrepresent the facts in an attempt to simplify. I'm sure there are some errors and falsehoods in PCI but I didn't see anything too bad in the one day that I've had the book.

Learning API's by reading the docs sounds like trying to learn english by reading the dictionary - It's just my personal preference, but I feel that I learn more effectively by reading real source code that works (even if it is horribly written)

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