This is meant to be a practical book. The author's "objective is to provide a thorough discussion of the most useful data-mining tools that goes beyond the typical'black box' description, and to show why these tools work". I think the result of reading and doing the exercises in this book is: 1. I will have acquired some familiarity with regression techniques and a few of the problems they can help with 2. I will have performed the regression techniques in R Over half the text focuses on various kinds of regression. Then there is a little bit on classification, decision trees, clustering, principal components analysis.

This is an excellent book which is very accessible to readers in several fields. It gives a very good summary of different statistical techniques which are used for data mining. It also gives some good large data sets and show how the tools can be implemented. It begins with a chapter on summarizing the data to have an initial feel about the data. Then it gives discussion on regression (linear, polynomial, nonparametric).