What an awesome book. Collective Intelligence shows you how to utilize mathematical search algorithms in a way for analyzing websites. In school I learned calcIII and calcV which was series and matrices respectively to analyze numbers. Well in this book you begin by understanding how to search for a character or string of data with a very well laid out plan. You even get to use real time data when developing your project in Python.
Then the improvement, when using some algorithms, Euclidian distance, Pearson coefficient, Entropy, Conditional Probability, you begin to utilize numbers by giving your websites a weight for how you search. Toby Segaran is excellent in explanation of building a smart web application to keep track where you go. It also teaches you to find out who has visited your site as well as the probability that your site will be chosen next.
Also with utilizing these search algorithms is good way to show the history of data to gain marketing for advertisements. Utilizing AI in the back ground is always great find but can be difficult to teach, but this book was laid out very well in getting to the point for a programmer to learn high rate math algorithms.
