Drew Conway Machine Learning for Hackers Reviews Summary

parsimonious text

interesting examples

clever coding

less expensive and easier to understand than most Springer texts

excellent coverage of data cleaning and exploratory data analysis

good coverage of ggplot2, plyr, and reshape2 packages

immediately practical case studies

detailed description of building machine learning solutions

substantial part of code is peripheral tasks

some code is out of date

too much time spent on R

not enough coverage of machine learning algorithms

errors in algorithms presentation

plots presented in black and white

trivial explanations of basic concepts

not recommended for beginners