I came across this while looking up some data compression info today. David J.C. MacKay Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms
Full text online: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/ It's a really excellent book, on the level of SICP but about information theory, probability, error correcting codes, etc. Very readable, and geeky (in a good way) at the same time. The writing style is perhaps along the lines of "Numerical Recipes", though the format is more conventional. The whole text is online as a pdf, which is very nice. The printed version is somewhat expensive, but according to the following analysis it's a better bargain than "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone": http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/Potter.html -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list