Suggestion needed to learn Machine Learning and Information Retrieval

Question

Hi!
I want lo learn about Information Retrieval and Machine Learning. Which books do you recommend and in what order do you think is better to read them? The idea is to reach a good understanding of recommendation systems.

Thanks!
Jonathan

Answer 1

I can't help you with machine learning, but for information retrieval, I've found the following two books to be extremely useful:

Information Retrieval

Managing Gigabytes

Answer 2

Well, you are in luck big time.

Stanford University has made there course on Machine Learning available via iTunes U.

Check it out at: Stanford Machine Learning Course

Answer 3

This is probably the most up-to-date book (not) out yet. It's a great textbook.

Answer 4

All the suggestions so far are very IR centric, so I'm going to recommend Programming Collective Intelligence. It will tell you how to program a very decent scoring system right away.

I also, just on general principle, recommend Introduction to Machine Learning. With these two books you won't know everything, but you'll know enough to understand the landscape and where to look next.

Answer 5

There is a brand new IR book written by people from Yahoo!, Stanford and University of Stuttgart. It is a free version available online.

Already mentioned, "Programming Collective Intelligence" is a really nice book with lots of web-related examples and good pratical hints, but is missed some of the theory. So it depends on your needs.