“Data Science” and “Data Scientists” are the buzzwords that have been floating around for a few years now. Many of us who are either outsiders or ar on the outskirts of the information technology industry have not been quite sure of what they mean. They seem to have something to do with statistics, databases, and software development, but it’s not quite clear in what way.

This short book tries to explain what is meant by “Data Science.” It is written from the perspective of information technology industry, and Silicon Valley in particular. Data Science has developed as a reaction of most Internet giants (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) to the particular needs of their businesses, and to collection and manipulation of enormous amounts of data distributed over thousands of computers in particular. This short ebook gives several examples of particular industry problems that data science addresses, and provides numerous links and references to the tools that have been developed for those tasks.

This ebook is written with the beginners in mind, but it does assume familiarity with software and other IT topics. It’s well written and informative as far as it goes, but it doesn’t provide much in terms of how to get into the whole data science game. Furthermore, as it was written and first published in 2011 it is probably pretty dated by now (2014). Nonetheless, it’s still a pretty good read.