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Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

Am I likely to learn anything of immediate practical benefit on this course? I'm not a computer scientist, just someone who writes lots of scripts to work with Unix/Excel/RDBMS/XML for a finance company.

(not that this would discourage me from taking the course, I'm just curious whether it will give me some new tools on my swiss-army-knife of programming knowledge, for my day job)

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For a quick overview of some machine learning fundamentals, you could check out Hilary Mason's "An Introduction to Machine Learning with Web Data" (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920017493.do) videos. They cover classification & clustering, with theory and a quick intro to some relevant Python libraries.

For your purposes, one potential use could be combing through lots of financial data for transactions that look unusual. (Another very common use for classification is spam filtering.)

I'd also recommend Programming Collective Intelligence (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do) which is filled with lots of python code showing how different algorithms and techniques can be used.

I thought about suggesting that, but when I started working through it, I kept running into errors in the code and formulas. He explains the concepts well, though.

_Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach_ by Russell & Norvig ("AIMA") is also quite good, though a bit more demanding of the reader.

It won't.

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