

O'Reilly discounts: machine learning, nltk, hadoop, sql, nosql, aws and appeng - drats
http://oreilly.com/store/dd-strata-dev.html

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codypo
The Programming Collective Intelligence book on sale here is wonderful! If you
want to build software that does something intelligent thanks to the mining of
a tremendous set of data (think recommendation engine, price models, content
classification, search engine, etc) and you're not sure where to start, start
with this book. Not being a CS academic, it's hard to find useful, non-trivial
introductions that I can understand on these topics. That's where this book
excels. It's one of the few technical books I regularly go back to.

~~~
silentbicycle
Seconded. It's got some minor errors* and omissions, but after reading it for
the concepts, I've found other data mining / machine learning books much
easier to follow. The explanations are usually pretty good.

* I've been doing the exercises in Lua, and got stuck on one of them - the listed algorithm (IIRC) erroneously ended with "1 - num/denom" rather than "num/denom". It's listed correctly earlier. (I can look up the specifics later, I don't have the book with me.)

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ralphc
Off and on I've been doing the exercises and examples in Clojure, and it's a
little difficult because the Python examples seem so imperative to me. It's
been a challenge turning them into functional code, there's a couple of places
where I go over a list twice when I probably should be able to get all I need
with one pass, and of course when I have to resort to using an atom or ref I
feel a little dirty.

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eam
I'm sure this is off topic, but as I was previewing the Hadoop book I saw this
quote by the creator of Hadoop as to why he choose the name Hadoop:

 _The name my kid gave a stuffed yellow elephant. Short, relatively easy to
spell and pronounce, meaningless, and not used elsewhere; those are my naming
criteria. Kids are good at generating such. Googol is a kid's term._

I just see a lot of startups having a hard time finding a decent name, so that
seems like a nice piece of advice worth pointing out.

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3pt14159
Has anyone read "Data Analysis with Open Source Tools"?
<http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596802356/> I can't seem to look through the
book, not even at Amazon, which I like to do before buying something.

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thomas11
This one is strange. It was just released this month, but without even a table
of contents. How are people supposed to decide whether to buy it?

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amorphous
Found the contents here: [http://my.safaribooksonline.com/databases/business-
intellige...](http://my.safaribooksonline.com/databases/business-
intelligence/9781449389802)

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mattwdelong
Wait, are these just ebooks or does this stand for the print copy as well?
Oddly, the receipt doesn't specify at checkout.

*Edit: Just confirmed, it`s for ebooks only.

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askedrelic
Ebooks :(

For personal use, this would be fine, but it's much easier to share paper
books at work.

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Goosey
I find that I simply can't use ebooks. Sitting and reading on a computer
monitor for long periods of time is just too much strain on my eyes. Funny
enough that I don't have as much issue coding all day or reading hackernews..
but if I sit and try to read multi-page articles or ebooks it just seems
impossible to do if it isn't on paper.

This is the one thing that tempts me into a Kindle. I wouldn't want to replace
my existing books (or stop purchasing new books when available), but an
increasing amount of 'long form' content I am interested in seems to be in
digital-only format... and self-printing is prohibitively expensive.

~~~
honopu
Try rotating one of your monitors either by buying a mount from monoprice or
going to home depot and hacking something together(i did the latter) reading
pdfs and ebooks has been way better, I considered(and had purchased) an ipad
to read on, i couldn't justify the larger kindle price. Rotating my monitor
for $13(though it is fixed, but reversible(with a screwdriver) made it much
easier to live with.

<http://imgur.com/dk8q8.jpg>

~~~
mattwdelong
Could you explain what exactly you hacked together to rotate your monitor like
that? I was thinking of purchasing a dual monitor mount that allows this
configuration, but would rather hack something together for the time being.

~~~
honopu
Sure, I purchased a bag of #8-32 x 1/2" zinc slot headed bolts, they included
the nuts as well.

I also purchased 30 #8 washers(wasn't sure how many i'd need to get the vesa
threaded holes tight with the 1/2" long bolt.)

I also purchased a flat 1/8" thick 2" wide by 36" piece of aluminum. I cut it
into 3 pieces, used two, drilled 4 holes in each, made those holes slightly
larger than the bolt (for wiggle room before tightening down as i didn't
measure as well as I should have). I used aluminum even though it was more
expensive vs steel because I know drilling steel is a pain in the ass.

I used a piece of paper for the vesa mount hole template, I took the sheet of
paper, aligned the center of two vesa mount holes with one of the edges of the
paper and marked those with a line (intersect the holes with the edge of the
paper and the two lines, that make sense?), the other two i just used a pencil
and poked a hole through while laying the paper on the monitor back. I again
used the slightly larger drill bit so I didn't have to be ultra precise.

Since I didn't modify the stand at all I can always go back to the standard
orientation, it'd take maybe 3 minutes to put it back. Using my method I
retained the default stand and have some tilt capability as well.

My marvel of human engineering(the back of the monitor w/ the aluminum
attached) <http://imgur.com/ZeHvP.jpg>

edit: fixed unclosed parenthesis

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thibaut_barrere
I bought and read the one on MongoDB which is really great (concise read, to
the point, and a learned a lot too). I am currently reading the NLP one and
it's a great read too.

Can anyone give reviews on the other ones (for instance the one on data
analysis) ?

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gomer
I bought and read the Collective Intelligence one and enjoyed it. It's a good
read.

~~~
jlees
Agreed. The collective intelligence book has had good reviews from me and
others on HN in the past. It's a good intro text with implementable examples.

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ludwigvan
Good discount. Also follow
<http://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/ebookdealoftheday> where they discount
50% of a different book everyday.

But still, don't you think the ebooks should be priced way lower? Maybe they
are expensive b/c they are drm-free. I know the fixed costs probably cost a
lot, and I wonder how much printing a book costs for publishers.

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bgentry
Anybody read the Cassandra book? Just picked it up but I was curious if
anybody else had found it to be especially useful.

