textbook

A good intro to information theory, please?

I know about Wikipedia and MacKay's Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (is it appropriate as textbook?). A textbook starting with Shannon's entropy and going through Conditional entropy and Mutual information is sought... Any idea? If you are following such a course at your university, which textbook is used? Thanks...

Data mining textbook

If you followed a DM course, which textbook was used? I know about Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (Second Edition) and this poll. What did you effectively use? ...

C# textbook with challenging exercises?

I'm looking for a C# textbook that has some interesting exercises at the end of each chapter. I'm not talking about 10 easy quiz problems that most books come with these days. I'm talking about doing exercises that asks you to write a program such as PayRoll, Cost Calculator, etc.? ...