Years ago when I first developed a website that allows for an easy access and reviews of scientific literature one of my long-term goals was to create recommendation system that would actually be useful for the users of this vast literature. Since my primary background is in Physics and not computer science or one of the related fields, this goal had only remained a dream. The technical difficulties seemed overwhelming and daunting, and I did not have either the time or the resources to invest in all the necessary tools and learning. However, it seems that in the intervening years there has been a great progress in developing a set of “consumer” level tools that are relatively easy to implement.

“Practical Machine Learning” is a short e-book intended to introduce the readers to some of the latest machine learning tools and packages. It is a very broad overview, and it is an ideal book for someone like me who has never even heard of such tools. These include Apache Mahout, Solr, LucidWorks and several others. This is not intended to be a tutorial on the subject. If you are already familiar with some of these tools then you will probably be wasting your time reading this book. It is a very nice and readable introduction to this field, and the book provides plenty of links to additional readings, resources, and training. The book has definitely given me ideas and encouraged me to go back to my old project and try to revive it and greatly improve its functionality.