Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, Second Edition (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems): Ian H. Witten, Eibe Frank: 9780120884070: Amazon.com: Books

I chose this book after looking at a number of options. The text is clearly written for individuals with an bachelor-level education in computer science. The author prefers pseudocode and text explanations of algorithms to equations, and when he does use equations they use clear, commonly understandable notation rather than the terse greek alphabet soup preferred by many of the more mathematically oriented authors. It should be pointed out that about 10% of the text of this book is devoted simply as a user manual for an open source MLA package called Weka. When I first realized this I almost flipped; I really didn't want a book that was devoted to gaining a surface understanding of a particular implementation of a set of algorithms.