On 19 February 2011 22:52, Petr Cvengros <[email protected]> wrote: > Yeah, I believe the book is great. Its only problem is that it isn't > free and the first free chapter doesn't give much details on setting > Mahout up. People who would like to experiment a bit with an open > source library usually aren't willing to buy a $30 book. Anyway, I > think at least the introductory documentation should be freely > available.
Yes. I recently bought the book, and it's worth every penny. I've been experimenting with Mahout since last year, but it took quite a bit of messing around before getting to the stage where I knew it was something that I wanted a book about. Having a bit more gentle intro material free online would only complement the book, and help people realise they'd benefit from it. My learning experience was fairly positive so far. I first followed the Taste demo and happily swapped out the data file for one of my own, which gave me a simple demo recommender without writing a line of code. That simple exercise was very reassuring. After that, the trail scattered in various directions and I felt relatively lost. Should I talk the ant build file from the demo .zip at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mahout/ and explore from there? Or build on top of Maven? Or on the commandline since there seem to be a lot of commandline utilities. And that familiar "I guess I should try using Eclipse again" feeling. If I care about the Hadoop side, how does that affect my choices? if I want to code in another language should I build REST services with the HTTP service machinery that comes with Taste, or is that just for demos, just for recommenders? I doubt there are 'right' answers to all of these, but I felt as if stood at a crossroads with interesting arrows pointing in every direction. So buying the book gives a bit of structure to all this. While not a natural user of Eclipse, I got set up and worked through the examples (copypaste from pdf mostly, a bit frustrating but forced me to really read the code). This helped hugely in getting from "I'm pretty sure I heard that Mahout does X" to having running code on my machine that actually does it... cheers, Dan
