I was about to buy PCI a few days ago, but was worried that the information may be out of date, considering it was published six years ago.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?
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 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.
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.