Mastering the formal academic discipline of data science can involve years of study in sophisticated mathematics, complex pattern recognition, machine learning, uncertainty modeling, and other esoterica. For most of us non-academics, though, it's the practical task of extracting relevant, useful information from the sea of data generated by businesses, governments, and people. These Manning books will help you combine the programming skills you already have with the growing number of tools and technologies that make practical data science less daunting.

Data Science tools

One of the most important changes in the data science landscape is the wide availability of tools that make core data-crunching tasks much easier. The open-source R platform makes it a snap to digest and visualize all forms of data, and Hadoop makes it possible to easily store and process massive data sets. These books will help get you started.

· Practical Data Science with R » MEAP

· R in Action, Second Edition » MEAP

· Mondrian in Action » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· Hadoop in Practice » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· Hadoop in Action » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· Pig in Action » MEAP

· Big Data » MEAP

Machine Learning

Even before IBM's Watson rocked Alex Trebeck's world on Jeopardy!, machine learning had started to move from academic ivory towers into startups and big enterprises competing to make sense out of the massive data streams users leave behind as they surf, shop, and share on the internet. Machine learning is now a required skill, and these books will put you ahead of the curve.

· Machine Learning in Action » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· Mahout in Action » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· Algorithms of the Intelligent Web » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· Collective Intelligence in Action » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

Intelligent search

Search has grown from a nice-to-have feature to become an indispensable part of virtually every application. No longer the specialized domain of a select few, tools like Elasticsearch and Solr put high-performance search within reach of all application developers and system engineers. Tools like Tika and ManifoldCF extend the range of your search to nearly any format or repository. Start here.

· Elastic Search in Action » MEAP

· Lucene in Action, Second Edition » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· Solr in Action » MEAP

· Taming Text » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· Tika in Action » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· ManifoldCF in Action » MEAP

Smart content management

Content management and discovery is key to successful data science. Whether you're using the new linked data standards like RDF-A to tag business or government data, developing discoverable websites, or managing data in one or more content repositories, you need to implement a flexible and scalable content management strategy.

· Linked Data » MEAP

· Mondrian in Action » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· CMIS and Apache Chemistry in Action » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· HTML5 in Action » MEAP

NoSQL

Database technology has evolved dramatically in the past few years to include numerous new data storage systems designed to augment or replace traditional RDBMS products like MySQL or SQL Server. Graph databases, key-value stores, and document-centric databases all add new dimensions to the role of data storage in your data science strategy.

· Neo4j in Action » MEAP

· RavenDB in Action » MEAP

· MongoDB in Action, Second Edition » MEAP

· Redis in Action » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· HBase in Action » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· Making Sense of NoSQL » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

Languages

As a developer, programming languages are your bread and butter. Established languages like Python and Ruby, along with their numerous high-quality libraries, have emerged as low-overhead ways to tackle data analysis tasks. Functional programming languages like Scala and Clojure provide a closer match between your code and data, and offer a scalable coding paradigm for data science.

· The Quick Python Book » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· Hello! Python » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Second edition » MEAP

· Scala in Action » pBook, PDF, ePub, and Kindle

· Scala in Depth » MEAP

· Clojure in Action, Second Edition » MEAP

· The Joy of Clojure, Second Edition » MEAP

· Functional Programming with Scala » MEAP