Note: While I try my best, there are times when I do not read the books cover to cover. I have tried to keep the reviews as short and generic as possible.
This book is like Bible for NLP. If you have not read it, you don’t know Natural Language Processing. This book covers areas like speech processing, language processing – both lexical and semantic. If you want to train your own model you should read this book. The amount of time spent by authors in each topic is worth commending.
This book is a collection of thoughts – one thought per page. It talks about how human mind is a collection of smaller components for solving particular problems. If you are afraid that the big players in AI are going to build strong AI – read this book. You will know how mimicking human behavior is not so easy. What I found interesting about this book was at times Minskey would leave the area of machine intelligence and move towards spirituality. He has some interesting pages on what “being self aware” means. This is a Must Have for anyone interesting in strong AI.
I loved reading this book (and the follow up eBook where Luger uses LISP and Java to implement the algorithms). Luger has great command on programming along with a very clear understanding of AI. I picked up this book after I read the eBook to dig more into his ideas. I think his object oriented implementation of Search algorithms is what I loved the most.
This book comes from the people who started the boosting revolution. In the first chapter itself you are introduced to the boosting algorithm and the pseudo code to implement it. The later chapters talk about why boosting works along with proofs of various theorems. If you just want to implement boosting, go though a couple of chapters, If you are a researcher or part of an advanced machine learning course, you should definitely check it out.
This book from Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig is one the most read textbooks in artificial intelligence. The book builds your concepts on various area like Logical reasoning, symbolic as well as connectionist approach to solving problems. Some examples on how you can use First order logic and similar methods to solve board games are really good.
This book by Christopher M Bishop is probably the best textbook available to date. Almost every course (online/offline) will refer this book. The contents ( its extensive as well as intensive) might overwhelm you. While this is not a book to read cover to cover, you should have this available when you want to get a deeper understanding of mathematics behind the algorithms you are working with.
I love this book. It’s so well written that you could read it page after page and not get bored. It builds on how text retrieval works, how text is indexed. I wrote an algorithm that was taking about 2 seconds to compute a text piece. But when I implemented some of the techniques given here its processing time was reduced to 200ms. This is not a Natural Language Processing book but it has all the tricks you will need to work with real world applications that need to do text processing.
Jeff Hawkins is a big time technologist and entrepreneur. This book talks about his research on how human brain works. This book (and a followup whitepaper) forms the basis of research being done at Numenta - headed by Jeff himself. The book shows how our brain uses a hierarchical approach to be in “always predicting” mode. In one of the examples, Jeff mentions that when you come back home and the door knob is moved by an inch you would still notice. Another one is when you are climbing stairs and you miss one step your brain realized it right away and tried to rebalance your body. The concepts in this book have lead to “Hierarchical Temporal Memory” which is one of the most successful algorithms for anomaly detection.
I got into the world of machine learning when I saw the Jeopardy video by IBM. It’s a small video but if you want to know how all that happened –read this book. What I love about this book is that it has some great pointers if you are building a question answering system. It talks about the hard work IBM team put in to build Watson. It shows how by improving module by module you can achieve something as complex as Watson. After reading this book I realized that Watson was trained not to mention certain forbidden & embarrassing answers even if they had a very high probability!!
This is an expensive book but worth every dollar you spend on this one. The author explains the entire ML landscape in three paragraphs – perhaps the best summary I have ever seen. It touches on Boosting, Bagging and how they can be used to improve models. Ensemble methods have become extremely popular due to the improvement in accuracy and performance. If you need a basic idea on ensembles, you may not need this book. If you want to dig deep this is a great read.
While this book is meant for people getting into visual effects, I was amazed by the usefulness to someone working in computer vision. I highly recommend watching the online lectures by Prof Rich Radke and use this book as you go along. I got my “Intelligent Matting” approach after going through this book. Prod Radke has carefully identified examples and case studies which help you get the ideas really well.
If you have not seen the tutorial by Prof Mustafa, I think you are still a rookie in machine learning. This book starts with the question that “Is Learning Possible” and then builds on top of that. This book uses “Perceptron” based learning approach which can be generalized to any machine learning system. In one of the sections Prof Mustafa shows that if your training data is not seeing enough variations, learning will never be good. I love his approach of raising questions in your mind before telling you the correct way. Amazing book.
Taleb is one of the great story tellers I have seen. If you believe in pattern matching, this book will tell you why its limited. As the name suggests, you might have the belief that all swans are white. In fact these beliefs might be passed from generation to generation until one day you see a “black” swan. Black swan is a rare event that can break your entire belief, predictive models and viewpoint towards things. It’s a must read.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb was a big time trader before he starting talking about randomness. If you are a Machine Learning person, I believe, you will take the fact that “everything has a pattern” by heart. This book is an “anti” approach to pattern. Taleb talks about how in various cases people have lost money on trading, why the housing crash happened and some more thoughts. This book builds up on “Black swan” by Taleb.
This is an old book where Marvin Minskey has collected various articles on NLP and combined into a book. If you are interested in where it all started, you should read this book. It talks about how Minskey and other researchers in 70’s looked at NLP and how they build interfaces that could parse simple commands. A lot of papers have research ideas that are no longer being pursued but definitely very interesting to read about.
This book is for serious NLP researchers and not for engineers. Dealing with Theoretical linguistics, it talks about various strategies to determine the semantic meaning from text. Since this book deals with representation and not parsing natural language sentences, it could be a good reference for you to build systems that respond in common language. It also covers combinatorial algorithms in natural language representation.
This book by Bishop is from pre deep learning era and focused primarily on Feed Forward Neural Networks. This book does an in depth analysis of Neural Network, Optimization techniques and combining networks. While most AI books would have Neural Networks as a chapter, this book fills in the missing pieces that other skip.
Ray Kurzweil has been an advocate of Artificial Intelligence for decades now. He has done several talks and written several articles on AI. This book is focused around the idea of Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models and how HHMM’s can solve the problems our mind has to deal with. HHMM’s have been very successful in solving speech to text problems. This is a good read if you want to get an insight on how some of these big names are looking at AI.
If you are working with Neural Networks then the book "Perceptrons" is perhaps one of the books that you should definitely read. This is the first systematic study of parallelism in computation and has remained a classical work on threshold automata networks for nearly two decades. The connectionist revolution, which was shadowed by the symbolic era for a while, started when this book came out. Marvin Minsky (Co-Founder of MIT AI Labs) and Papert have done quite a lot of mathematical analysis of the original "perceptron". The "Neuron" in a Artificial Neural network owes its existence to the concept of perceptron. While the content is excellent, you might find the language a bit difficult to understand. A major reason being that a lot of concepts that we use seamlessly today came up after this book came.
If you are just starting up with Machine Learning, this is one of the books I would recommend. This book covers Unsupervised as well as supervised learning and has several examples of how it could be used in the Industry. However, I did find that this book does not have the mathematical detail you would need when working with the algorithms. I think the authors have tried to build something for the programmers so they can get hands on very easily. I did like the emphasis this book gives on data preparation and cleansing.
This is an expensive book and highly technical. When I first picked it I did not understand anything – even the back cover. However if you want to work with complex NLP expressions (lambda) and work with combinatorial stuff this is a great reference. You will need several years of experience with Lambda expressions, First Order Logic and reasoning to understand the contents of the book. If you are a researcher this is a good investment. If you want to solve a quick problem and move on - I would not recommend this.
Marvin Minskey is a legend. His death in January 2016 was a major blow. This mind-expanding book he talks about how emotions, intuitions and feelings work. If you are into building strong AI you should read this book (and Society of Mind). You can’t read this book cover to cover as it will make you think a lot. If you loved “Thinking Fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman, chances are you will love this book also.
This book gives a great overview of the OpenCV library. Although all the examples are in C++, If you have some basic experience with digital image processing you should be able to port it to Java pretty easily. I like how the book explains various concepts without getting too much into mathematical details. I was able to implement several filters by going through this book. If you want to build some really amazing vision applications, you should have this book handy
As far as I am aware, Jeff Heaton is perhaps one of the initial implementers of Machine learning in Java. His company Heaton research provides Encog framework that has almost everything – Neural networks, Clustering, Singular value decomposition and what not. Jeff’s approach is to give you the idea without making the mathematics heavy. This book is part of the 3 series in AI. All three are easy to read. His explanation on Genetic algorithms, along with pseudo code implementations is a great attraction.
If you are just starting up you can pick this book. It has everything you need to explore which problems are solved by which algorithms. However, if you already have some idea on Machine Learning you can read this book as well. It kind of fills in the missing pieces. I really liked the explanation on preprocessing stage and why you should do that. He takes special effort to make your comfortable in working with categoric, nominal as well as Boolean data.
This is an interesting book. When I picked it up I actually read almost 80% in one go. If you have a basic idea of machine learning and want to refer to a text book, this is a good one. However, one thing I, personally, do not like is how the author has actually broken down the matrix notation to individual operations in chapter one making things confusing. I believe matrix notation could have worked well. But still, I highly recommend this book. It has a great explanation on Clustering, Gaussian Mixture models.
Shai Shalev-Shwartz is one of the popular people in machine learning research world. With dozens of papers published his breadth of research is outstanding. This book covers several topics and is structured very well for undergraduates. I recommend reading this book as well as the papers to anyone who is serious about optimization techniques and machine learning in general.
Ok, I am a Java guy. Will always be. But my peers, almost everyone uses Python for machine learning. I picked up this book to understand the code that various open source tools (and online examples) implement algorithms. You don’t find much in Java when you compare to Python. This book was precise, well structured and comprehensive. If you want to start machine learning with python, read this book first.
Singularity is a state when machines will take over humans. This book talks about various advancements in AI that are eventually going to lead to singularity. Ray Kurzweil is a leading authority on AI and his ideas are very interesting to read.
If you want to train your own models for NLP based problems you should check this book out. It talks about best practices on annotating models and tells about tips and tricks for building Gold quality models. It also talks about bootstrapping where you train a model and use it to automate annotation.
Tom Mitchell’s book has been around for a while and lot of educational institutions prescribe it for undergraduate studies. This book has everything you need in machine learning. However, after reading several other books on Machine Learning I believe this book could be a bit flat in story telling
This book gets you ready on Machine learning and then goes on to showing you how to implement it using the Java WEKA framework. If you are a weka user, this is perhaps the only book out there. When I started working with weka this book was helpful. WEKA framework is really good and you know how to work with ARFF format for representing data.
This is a great book for understanding more about use cases of spark. It has uses cases like music recommendation, Taxi trip data as well as semantic analysis. It also has some excellent examples of working with decision trees. Being open source and ability to run Java, spark has become a de-facto platform for all enterprise machine learning. If you are in the enterprise, this book is for you.
This book talks about content based image retrieval. This is an interesting and a hot area. If you want to make an image search engine, this is a good place. It talks about features, histograms and how you can use them to build a search engine. It focuses on the LIRE library which has several utilities built in. If you work with Convolutional Neural Networks, this book may not be for you.
If you are a big data guy (or want to be) this is a great book. Why is it listed here in Machine learning, well if you want to do distributed machine learning and have terabytes of data you need this book. This book is great for engineers as well as data scientists. This will get you ready with the concepts of RDD’s. While there is a chapter on Machine learning, I would recommend a follow-up book to see how machine learning works with Spark
This book burnt a hole in my pocket and unfortunately did not deliver much. If you want to know amazing things IBM is doing you can look at it. Most of the time it looked like marketing material on IBM. And when it was not, it was talking in general about next generation computing – distributed, cognitive and big data oriented. One thing that came out clear was that while IBM advertises “Watson” as a system – it’s actually an umbrella of AIML and Big data algorithms that need to be programmed to work on a case by case basis. It also talks about how IBM solved problems with working and moving large amounts of data. You can probably read it cover to cover on a flight and get the lingo to speak in an IT conference.
In this book Peter Theil talks about the idea of creating disruptive solutions rather than incremental improvements. This book actually may not align with startup ideas that have been floating around specially with respect to lean Startups. But I think this is a great book that gives you a perspective on working with technologies that can give you a huge advantage over your competition. And do read the discussion about “Unabomber”.
Everyone knows about the Wikinomics book, it’s an all time best seller. You should read how collaboratively people have built systems that can really help make the world a better place. The book talks about open source revolution as well.
This book comes from a designer and it talks about the importance of design in product development. This book talks about the concept of “Design Thinking” and how product companies are using this approach to build better teams, products and companies.
This book was very helpful for understanding overall way in which funding works. The examples in this book are not just great but help you associate them to your product easily. This book tells you about the different stages - angel investing, VC investing and raising further rounds. It talks about term sheets, tricks played by VC’s and how to make sure your deals are structured well. The book talks about both physical products as well as our software products. You should definitely do this.
This book is a piece of art. All the time you keep thinking how do they to sell this. All the pages are in Hi definition color. I think the book succeeds in content quality as well as presentation. The step by step approach with diagrams, checklists and todo’s help you learn and implement things right away. This book comes from a company that is dedicated to helping start-ups. I think I fell in love with this book the moment I got it in my hands.
This book gives you a new perspective on how the economy of the world works. Tim Harford talks about how organic food is priced, how the supermarkets place different things, how they make you pay more if you are a price insensitive coffee lover. His storytelling is so awesome that you can’t help but read this book cover to cover.
This book talks about the initial days of Twitter and how the relationship between Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey evolves. It talks about how it all started with Odeo and then pivoted to Twitter. When you read this you see how co-founder conflict, management disagreements and investor interference can change the face of a company. Nevertheless it’s a great read.
I picked up this book when I was getting ready for a manufacturing consulting assignment. This book is like the bible for someone who wants to understand how the processes in the manufacturing work - things like inventory management, supply chain, assembly line etc. All this in the context of a guy trying to save his company from being shut down. Amazing story telling. I think this is one of the best books written in the last three decades you should definitely read this one.
I think the power of the book lies in the checklists and step-by-step stuff that is available. The Author has a great understanding of problems faced by start-ups at different levels. He focuses on the initial troubles in terms of setting up a new company, raising money and validating your product.
This book is like the practical portion of the Lean startup book by Eric Ries. Ash Maurya has worked very closely with Eric and has a number of examples, checklists and step-by-step guides on how you can incorporate the lean Startup methodology into your product. I think once you have read Eric’s book you should go and get this as well. This is a well structured book.
If you are coming from a tech background and want to understand the financial terms like balance sheets, profit and loss, assets, liabilities work - you should read this book. Anil Lamba has presented the idea so well that a number of startups initiatives invite him to come and talk about this side of the business. this is a great book
This book comes from a group (The BaseCamp guys), which has changed my thinking of how a startup should work. If you have read the original book by 37 signals - the one named “Getting real”, then you will love this book. It talks about how you should structure your project management, product delivery, management of bugs and enhancements and other areas so as to achieve the highest returns with least number of people and without raising money.
37 Signals, the company behind BaseCamp has most office people who work remotely. This book is a must read for managers who need to structure the remote workforce. It talks about things like how to monitor workforce when the time zones are different , there is lack of physical presence and projects have a tight schedule. One part of the book is meant for remote workers and talks about how to manage your work to achieve a great work-life balance making sure your deliveries are on time and of great quality.
This book talks about how you can make your product into something that customers notice. Written by the marketing guru and famous blogger Seth Godin, the book’s odd name comes from the fact that if you are driving and you see a cow you pay attention. If you keep seeing cow’s again and again, your interest goes down. Then if suddenly you see a purple cow – you are interested again.
This book has something new to offer. If you are in consulting style business, this is a book for you. It talks about how the pumpkin farmers work their way through all the odds and come up with gigantic winning pumpkins. Some ideas could make you uncomfortable – like the one in which you are asked to keep your top N customers and fire the rest. Sound reasoning and business experience support this new way of thinking about business.
Another bestseller by Malcolm Gladwell. The book talks about how some people end up being hugs successes and others end up suffering in mediocrity. It talks about Bill Gates and why there were enough reasons to make sure he succeeds. The book gives you a new perspective on understanding on what scenarios create outlier phenomenon.
Starting with the Netflix example, Chris Anderson does an indepth analysis of how online companies are catering to that segment of customers which is totally overlooked by brick and mortar shops. The retail shops have limited space and can accommodate the best sellers to make a profit, whereas online companies like Netflix can leverage internet to make available those services/products which might sound interesting to a very small (and underserved) segment of customers.
This small book will drive you crazy. I read it cover to cover in a few hours. Seth Godin tells you how you need a story to go with whatever you are selling. If the story aligns with the viewpoint of your customers, you will succeed. It talks about why we should not try to change customer viewpoints but rather find customers whose viewpoint aligns with our story. A great read indeed.
Sheryl Sandberg’s experiences as part of senior management roles at Facebook have helped her shape this book about women. It talks about the challenges women are facing while working with men. It also provides some excellent advice on what strategy women should take to have a successful career. This book started the “Lean In” movement worldwide.
This book started all “Lean Startup” movement. Eric Ries picked up the “Lean” methodology implemented by Manufacturing, repackaged it and made it the way of life for startups. This book talks about how customers should be included in the product development right from the beginning and should validate your product at every step. It mentions how a startup is just a series of experiments in which you validate or invalidate your assumptions. Every person who wants to start a startup should read this.
The book gives you an inside glimpse of the world’s best startup accelerator – Y-Combinator. Randell Stross was allowed to monitor and analyze two batches of the program. I think every founder has dreamt of being part of this program and this book gives you an opportunity to understand what really happens in there. Each chapter is devoted to one (or more) startup where it talks about how interaction with the YC partners, fellow entrepreneurs and the startup community is helping build billion dollar companies. O and the demo day description is pretty nice. You can just imagine what it would feel to present in front of a hall full of Investors.
I loved this book and have recommended it to everyone who is creative, wants to be creative as well who things he is not creative. The authors have tried to come up with a methodical way of being creative. It talks about how you can add, subtract, multiply or divide features to come up with awesome products. It has several examples to support the process. Must read.
This book has short stories of entrepreneurs who have bootstrapped and built serious businesses solely fuelled by the passion within. This book will be a great enabler if you are stuck in a job, want to get out but just can’t. This book is not just about online products but also about brick and mortar shops, consultants and social entrepreneurs.
Nir Eyal has provided a rich and validated explanation of why some products enter into our daily lives in such a way that they form a habit. It talks about how we can’t imagine a life without email, Facebook and other products. The analysis evolves into how entrepreneurs can design their products keeping the “Being Hooked” methodology in mind.
While this is a self development book, you will love reading this even if you are an entrepreneur. It talks about how we can fool our mind to inculcate a new habit or get rid of a habit we don’t like. It talks about the reasons people fall back to old habits and also provides a method to avoid it. This book talks about pain and rewards methodology which can help build habit forming products.
This book by Jim Collins is probably the only book that all business schools recommend. It provides the entire landscape of how some companies have become great billion dollar companies and some how some billion dollar ventures have fallen apart. It talks about the strategy that senior management should take if the want to convert their “Good” company to a “Great one”. At times this book might feel like a textbook.
A worldwide best seller by Chris Anderson this book talks about Wikipedia, Open source movement and other FREE initiatives that have shaped this modern world. While the title might look like “Free from a commercial perspective”, the book extends the idea on to “Freedom to use, improve and distribute” – the basic pillars of the open source movement. If you always wondered how companies like Google, Facebook, Skype make money by giving stuff free, you should read this book.
This book will give you guts to compete with the big brands. It talks about how small companies leveraged their “smallness” to overshadow products by large corporations. Based on the Greek story by the same name, it provides several strategies that your startup can employ.
This book comes from a guy who predicted outcomes for US presidential elections and is perhaps well known authority on forecasting. As the name suggests he talks about the art and science of forecasting with various examples from different domains – weather, poker and sports. This book is not meant to be technical and that is why it’s a great read for anyone starting up with “predictive modelling”.