That is indeed how I am positioning it in this draft book proposal -- it's for a 'Mahout in Action' book from Manning. They want to understand why this wouldn't be just another Collective Intelligence in Action (which I do think is quite a good book, at least, I learned a good deal about Lucene from it.)
On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Tanton Gibbs <tanton.gi...@gmail.com> wrote: > I hope I'm one of the targeted audience members for the book. I've > used hadoop, done clustering (not with Mahout), have read about > collaborative filtering, and plan on using Mahout in a business > intelligence setting in 1-2 years. However, I've never used Mahout > itself. What I would like to see is more of a cookbook style. I want > to know the whys, not just the hows. Why should I normalize data in a > certain way before clustering it, what happens if I don't, etc.... > I've read Collective Intelligence in Action and found it pretty much > useless - I don't need another survey on the topic. Instead, I want > to know the ins and outs of mahout so that when I go to sell it to > someone I can answer any and all of their questions around it. If you > want an introductory chapter on the topics, that is fine, but keep > them short and point to other materials. > > Thanks! > Tanton >
