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Comment by angrycoder | Hacker News Reader

From Safari:

		Preface
		Machine Learning for Hackers: Email
		How This Book is Organized
		Conventions Used in This Book
		Using Code Examples
		How to Contact Us
		Using R
		R for Machine Learning
		Further Reading on R
		Data Exploration
		Exploration vs. Confirmation
		What is Data?
		Inferring the Types of Columns in Your Data
		Inferring Meaning
		Numeric Summaries
		Means, Medians, and Modes
		Quantiles
		Standard Deviations and Variances
		Exploratory Data Visualization
		Visualizing the Relationships between Columns
		Classification: Spam Filtering
		This or That: Binary Classification
		Moving Gently into Conditional Probability
		Writing Our First Bayesian Spam Classifier
		Ranking: Priority Inbox
		How Do You Sort Something When You Don’t Know the Order?
		Ordering Email Messages by Priority
		Writing a Priority Inbox
		Works Cited
		Books
		Articles
		About the Authors

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That looks like TOC for "Machine Learning for Email", which is just a portion of the entire "Machine Learning for Hackers" book. The full "Machine Learning for Hackers" doesn't appear to be on Safari yet.

It doesn't look as advanced as Collective Intelligence (the Python-based book which covers most of Ng's ML course), but it looks like a cool R introduction.

Are you referring to this book http://www.flipkart.com/books/8184043708?_l=rNOfRA_2s1pRNn46... ??

using R seems a bit strange to me -- i have nothing against R (use it regularly), but not exactly a "hacker" language. this seems like an ideal book for python, but R?

I had the same feeling when I saw this. R is a great tool for statistics, very useful when you need to do in-depth statistical analysis (analysis of variance, etc.). It doesn't strike me as a good choice for a hacker's book - which makes me think about their reasons to use this word, hacker. Maybe they are just trying to benefit from the buzz that it generates these days?

indeed, this was my first reaction as well...seems like a bit of marketing gimmick to toss the word "hacker" into the title.

Python or a jvm language should be a better choice

Why are hackers allowed to use Python but not R? R is a quite powerful Scheme-like language with an incredible math library. Python is a "teaching language", officially.

thanks, just what I was looking for!

unfortunately I see here, that there seems to be a large part of the book spent on a statistics introduction (including R) and only one machine learning algorithm actually gets introduced. and on top of all it's one of the most simple ones (naive bayes). I expected at least some further description of support vector machines or other advanced techniques.

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