Signal and the noise by Nate Silver(Very nice read. Chapters on climate change and GDP forecasting were a bit slow, but everything else was a page turner) http://www.amazon.com/dp/159420411X

Why I left Goldman Sachs by Greg Smith (Good insight into the 2008 financial breakdown and a look into the day to day operations of Goldman Sachs) http://www.amazon.com/Why-Left-Goldman-Sachs-Street/dp/14555...

The Hobbit http://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-There-Again-Illustrated-Author/...

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques(Great intro into data mining) http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Concepts-Techniques-Manage...

Programming Collective Intelligence(You can play around with actual implementations of the concepts in the previous book) http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...

Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick (Was really nice to see the details behind Mitnick's adventures) http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wires-Adventures-Worlds-Wanted/d...

On War By Clausewitz(Really enjoyed this book.)http://www.amazon.com/War-Carl-von-Clausewitz/dp/1448676290

Ruby's great for recommendation engines and JRuby has all the Java libraries. Programming Collective Intelligence is a good starter book:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596529325?tag=loucalnet-20&cam...;

Check out [Programming Collective Intelligence](http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...). I found it to be a good introduction to machine learning because it uses practical (and neat) examples to teach the concepts. One of my top 5 programming books.

Ditto. Here's an Amazon link, for the lazy: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...

Just a quick note if you're interested, this book is similar and is an absolutely fantastic 'applied beginner' ML book "Programming Collective Intelligence"

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...

Python seems to be pretty popular for AI. This is a shot in the dark but could have something to do with the popularity of "Programming Collective Intelligence". It uses and teaches Python and is a top seller in the AI category on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596529325?ie=UTF8&tag=...

I have really enjoyed going through the examples in that book, which was the first time I did any AI (although one might argue it's light on the AI side) type stuff since doing some Lisp stuff way long ago.

I've been deep into building a geocoder the past month. While we may get rid of Solr eventually, it was a great foot in the door to information retrieval. It helps that I have a problem to solve and a deadline, so I'm motivated to read and work through these books. These three texts have been very helpful. The last book is an excellent overview of text processing and some real world problems you may encounter writing your search engine.

Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server http://www.amazon.com/Solr-1-4-Enterprise-Search-Server/dp/1...

Programming Collective Intelligence http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...

Building Search Applications: Lucene, LingPipe, and Gate http://www.amazon.com/Building-Search-Applications-Lucene-Li...

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...