Since the concept of "machines learning" was introduced in the 1950s, the field has gone from a cryptic domain understood by a few (Turing, Markov, Legendre, Laplace or Bayes) to a technology that every company must deploy. Every day we hear how data and automation improve our shopping experiences, our online searches and enables fraud prevention and cybersecurity routines to do more, faster and better for us. Now, the amalgamates created around Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data are bound to confuse industry observers or investors who aren't familiar with the technical details. If you're asking yourself: "What's the difference between Big Data and Machine Learning?", then for the sake of my piece, simply think about it this way: "Big Data is Machine Learning's great uncle". Machine Learning doesn't need Big Data to exist.

He touches on algorithmic complexity of the approaches but avoids detailed discussion of the algorithms behind the methods. Ruby code is given for all approaches and it's easy to follow. There's a very brief intro to enough Ruby to understand the code even if you've never touched Ruby. I can't heavily recommend it but I also think the book achieves a reasonable set of goals for its (apparent) intended audience. I'm reluctant about the use of "AI" in the title and text but it's a loaded term in any case so I'll let that go. Don't buy the book -- even at the low cost -- without using Amazon's "look inside" feature to at least view the table of contents and sample pages. With these caveats, it might be useful to a Ruby -- or other beginning -- programmer needing quick solutions to similar problems as covered in this short book. If you're not in that category, I'd skip it and pick up a good general algorithm text covering data structures and searching. BTW, the Kindle version is a much better buy if you decide you're a fit.

Java is a programming language expressly designed for use in the distributed environment of the Internet. It was designed to have the "look and feel" of the C language, but it is simpler to use than C and enforces an object-oriented programming model. The exercises and presentation of content where extremely helpful. This is the first instruction manual I've used where I actually found myself reading all of the lessons instead of just skipping ahead to the exercises. Syntax is discussed artfully, leaving more room for an exploration of concepts and practices - meaning that someone new to OOP will understand not only what to do but the best way to do it. Highly recommended for people ready to learn how to program.