Sunday, July 19, 2009

Must Read Book for Web Developers

Today I got my copy of Programming Collective Intelligence and I wish I had bought this book back when it came out. In my day job, I am developing mostly social networking type sites, and I could have saved days of hair pulling.

Some days it seems as if I am just writing the same old "dumb" web-sites, and I never really understood how other programmers integrated the massive amounts of data we collect every day into a usable and actionable form, both for user and stake-holder. I figured it involved complicated maths that I either don't remember or never took (dotcom college dropout here). Tobey Segaran puts data mining concepts into readable English and sample code.

I never post book reviews, but I am only 3 chapters in, and I love it.