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Comment by ghc | Hacker News Reader

I can't judge the coursera course, but for anyone who is interested in this field and wants a gentle introduction, I high recommend Programming Collective Intelligence (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do). It covers many of the types of recommender systems that the coursera course is likely to cover, and comes with a lot of nice Python code examples.

It's highly useful knowledge too. I ran across so many startups that needed recommender systems that I launched a company called Algorithmic.ly (http://algorithmic.ly) to help companies without the expertise integrate recommendation systems and other types of algorithms into their projects.

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PCI is a great book. One book I'll recommend after reading it is "Mining of Massive Datasets" (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds.html) - Chapter 9 especially. It goes into more depth than what's covered in PCI and it's not too difficult to follow.

I'm working on a personal project in recommender systems so I look forward to enjoy this course.

Thanks for that link. Chapter 7 helped answer some of the questions I had after reading PCI.

In this short article I have implemented the algorithm in the Programming Collective Intelligence in 9 lines of code

http://tungwaiyip.info/2012/Collaborative%20Filtering.html

I was about to buy PCI a few days ago, but was worried that the information may be out of date, considering it was published six years ago. Do you think most of the material is still pertinent?

I believe all of the material is still pertinent. It primarily uses the MovieLens data set and mostly builds off of textbook techniques and generic Python. It's not a book that will go out of data quickly.

Go for it. It's a great book and except for references to friendster as the big social network and facebook a newbie, nothing else seemed dated to me. Most of the APIs used in the book are still pretty much available except probably(??) delicious API.

I was a technical reviewer of that book (although no knowledge of PCI in practice), and I found it to be less moment-specific and more general grounding and strategy than I expected. It really is a good book.

Thanks for the recommendations, all. Just got my copy delivered yesterday and I'm looking forward to digging into it.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Meta. Sorry :P

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