Machine learning - the art of creating applications that learn from experience and data - has been around for many years. However, in the era of big data, huge amounts of information is being generated. This makes machine learning an unavoidable source of new data-based approximations for problem solving. With 'Learning Scikit-Learn', you will learn to incorporate machine learning in your applications. The book combines an introduction to some of the main concepts and methods in machine learning with practical, hands-on examples of real-world problems.
When you browse Amazon’s catalog and read “…the book starts with a brief introduction to the core concepts of machine learning. Then, using real-world applications and advanced features, it takes a deep dive into the various machine learning techniques. You will learn to evaluate results and apply advanced techniques.” you expect the book to deliver. It does not, which makes it a big disappointment.
What’s wrong with the title? Well, the book does not teach the scikit-learn package. It does show a very quick overview of some of its features.
What about the description? Well, the book does not introduce you to the concepts of machine learning. On the contrary, unless you have a decent background in ML, you will get lost. The authors don’t say a word about matplotlib and numpy either but believe me, if you can’t get through some code with confidence, you will end up looking at snippets of 10-15 lines without understanding what’s happening, Stack Overflow won’t save you.
The book itself is not that bad. I enjoyed the pages describing decision trees. I think this book, rather than being sold, should be used in the official scikit-learn webpage, as an overview.
Not worth the price. Not at all.
As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!
Short Answer I'll recommend the book to people who can debug python codes by themselves and have some basic machine learning knowledge.
This book gives a short and brief introduction for scikit-learn. I did get some ideas about how to use scikit-learn to do some basic machine learning things. I regard this book as a more detailed document. It might be better if it can provide more mathematics intuition.
Pros Quickly understand how scikit-learn works if you have already known some python and machine learning Awesome IPython Notebook
Cons: Some codes cannot be compiled. Some algorithms haven't been described clearly. Some libraries such like Pandas hasn't been described clearly. Lack of Math intuition.
It is not irregular for books about fast paced languages or libraries to become outdated quickly, but this book was both outdated and full of errata. There is a Github repo of iPython Notebooks to help, but I discovered that the further I went in the book the less accurate even these became to the point where I had to give up following along to the examples because they were so bad.
Instead of reading this book, read the manuals and documentation on scikit learn's website - they are more thorough, up to date, and maybe a little less dry.
Este libro de por si no es suficiente, no funciona como libro introductorio. Necesitas de un libro previo para poder saber cómo manejar la implementación
This was my very first machine learning book I read and gave me a very nice and practical overview of everything. Code might be outdated, but that shouldn’t affect your reading.
a very brief introduction into scikit. Perfectly OK for me because I am new to scikit myself. Codes are easy to follow. But for a more serious scikit docu, take the Building machine learning systems with Python.