Sorry, I agree with the GP. This was a popular book for learning ML with Weka (which is still around): https://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Practical-Techniques-Mana...

There is also the Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) term which is still around via: https://www.kdd.org/

I recommend starting with weka and this great book: http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Practical-Techniques-Manag...

some other helpful books:

- Data Mining, by Witten and Franke; describes basics with rigor, including how to use Weka, which they wrote

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Practical-Techniques-Manag...

a couple java-based books from Manning:

- Collective Intelligence in Action (by Satnam Alag) and

- Algorithms of the Intelligen Web (Marmanis, Babenko)

-

spot on. OP: Are you asking how basic tf-idf works, or is there something you can't get lucene / SOLR / sphinx / tsearch to do easily?

nevertheless, here are some good background materials (search amazon on "data mining"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1584504609

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Practical-Techniques-Manag...

Also the Collective intelligence by Satnam alag is quite good (a lot of java code to wade through tho