

Ask HN: I'm looking to get started in Analytics; recommendations? - ricosroughnecks

As the title says, I've suddenly been bitten by the analytics bug (tracking, goal meeting, and general crunching of data). However, I have no idea where to start. 
Can anyone in the field, or otherwise, recommend any books, sites, etc?
Do forgive if this is vague, as without any prior studying, I'm not even sure if I'm asking the proper questions.<p>P.S. It's 10:30am on this side o' the world, and I'm heading to work, so I may not be able to respond to any questions for the next 9 hours.
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patio11
<http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/>

People I trust have told me his books are great reads.

I'm self-taught on analytics and blog about it, but it is probably scattered
over the last couple of years of posts. I wouldn't recommend it for an entry
to the discipline.

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limedaring
I'd also recommend jumping head first and start looking at analytic solutions
while going through blogs and books. I'm assuming you have a website already
that you want to start crunching data from — beyond the obvious
analytics.google.com, I'd recommend:

<http://www.clicktale.com/> (watch actual browsing behavior/generates
heatmaps)

<http://www.crazyegg.com/> (another heatmap generator)

<http://ethnio.com/> (less about analytics but usability is good too — this
helps recruit users for usability testing straight from your website).

<http://www.kampyle.com/> (get feedback from your users from a little widget).

<http://www.kissmetrics.com/> (track and optimize conversion funnels)

<http://mixpanel.com/> (more of a general analytics solution)

You don't have to use all of these solutions, but start playing around with
some and pulling in data.

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maxdemarzi
<http://www.inmoncif.com> Bill Inmon - Data Warehousing
<http://www.ralphkimball.com/> Ralph Kimball - Data Warehousing

<http://www.tableausoftware.com/> Data Visualization
<http://www.edwardtufte.com> Edward Tufte - Visual Data

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thegyppo
Google has two hours worth of Videos in its conversion university. This is the
training material for the Google Analytics IQ exam -
[http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/stati...](http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=iq_learning_center.cs)

I also recommend setting up the tracking code on a dev environment to get used
to the interface & how it reports :)

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michaelhans
<http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321>

Depending on your project scope I really enjoyed 'Programming Collective
Intelligence' by Toby Segaran. Some of the web API samples may be out of date
at this point but I don't consider that a deal breaker if you can find it used
cheap.

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helwr
learn analytics the hard way:

[http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/3/12/learning-
about-m...](http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/3/12/learning-about-
machine-learning-2nd-ed.html)

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jeffepp
consider working on the open source analytics project <http://piwik.org>

