Sean, Sounds good, I'd love to take a look at an outline. I too would love to see a cookbook style manual which focuses more on the details of implementation, how to optimize systems, best practices, etc. and fills in with some of the theory material where appropriate/needed. It wouldn't hurt to have a very modular outline (a clustering 'module', one for recommenders, one for classification), provide a bit of background on each (not more than say 4-5 pages worth honestly), walk through a basic example then deal with more advanced examples/cases. And if time allows, we could add more appendix-style chapters on background material. If not, references will do just fine.
On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 2:02 PM, Sean Owen <sro...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > > > -- Zaki Rahaman
