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Best Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
These texts cover the design of object-oriented software and examine how to investigate requirements, create solutions and then translate designs into code, showing developers how to make practical use of the most significant recent developments. Design Patterns is a modern classic in the literature of object-oriented development, offering timeless and elegant solutions to common problems in software design.
Reviews
"Depending on on how you think of programming, this book could be incredibly insightful, or horribly abstract and impractical."
"I find it very interesting and it goes into details for design patterns and re-use of code."
"I have been using this book as a reference on Design Pattern."
"This book will forever stand as a foundation of software development."
"OK, so this title has become almost a bible for the software industry - it seems to get cited by every other author I read, so I thought it was about time I actually bought a copy."
"Even though I program in ABAP, it helps me to translate the pattern into that code."
"Great book for who want to understand each pattern deeply."
"Excelent book."
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Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)
Capturing a wealth of experience about the design of object-oriented software, four top-notch designers present a catalog of simple and succinct solutions to commonly occurring design problems. Design Patterns is a modern classic in the literature of object-oriented development, offering timeless and elegant solutions to common problems in software design. It's a book of design patterns that describe simple and elegant solutions to specific problems in object-oriented software design....Once you understand the design patterns and have had an "Aha!"
Reviews
"Depending on on how you think of programming, this book could be incredibly insightful, or horribly abstract and impractical."
"I find it very interesting and it goes into details for design patterns and re-use of code."
"I have been using this book as a reference on Design Pattern."
"This book will forever stand as a foundation of software development."
"OK, so this title has become almost a bible for the software industry - it seems to get cited by every other author I read, so I thought it was about time I actually bought a copy."
"Even though I program in ABAP, it helps me to translate the pattern into that code."
"Great book for who want to understand each pattern deeply."
"Excelent book."
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Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
It uses graphical models to describe probability distributions when no other books apply graphical models to machine learning. "This beautifully produced book is intended for advanced undergraduates, PhD students, and researchers and practitioners, primarily in the machine learning or allied areas...A strong feature is the use of geometric illustration and intuition...This is an impressive and interesting book that might form the basis of several advanced statistics courses. "In this book, aimed at senior undergraduates or beginning graduate students, Bishop provides an authoritative presentation of many of the statistical techniques that have come to be considered part of ‘pattern recognition’ or ‘machine learning’. … With its coherent viewpoint, accurate and extensive coverage, and generally good explanations, Bishop’s book is a useful introduction … and a valuable reference for the principle techniques used in these fields." "Bishop (Microsoft Research, UK) has prepared a marvelous book that provides a comprehensive, 700-page introduction to the fields of pattern recognition and machine learning. Aimed at advanced undergraduates and first-year graduate students, as well as researchers and practitioners, the book assumes knowledge of multivariate calculus and linear algebra … . Extensive support is provided for course instructors, including more than 400 exercises, lecture slides and a great deal of additional material available at the book’s web site … ." … In summary, this textbook is an excellent introduction to classical pattern recognition and machine learning (in the sense of parameter estimation). "Author aims this text at advanced undergraduates, beginning graduate students, and researchers new to machine learning and pattern recognition. … In more than 700 pages of clear, copiously illustrated text, he develops a common statistical framework that encompasses … machine learning. … it is a textbook, with a wide range of exercises, instructions to tutors on where to go for full solutions, and the color illustrations that have become obligatory in undergraduate texts.
Reviews
"An excellent book!"
"The material is both rigorous, in-depth and at the same time suitably presented for a beginner with limited mathematical background to start smoothly."
"A compulsory book required by statistical machine learning, good for the course and research, but not recommend for practical machine learning."
"One of the best text books covering probabilistic background of learning in deep."
"Accept no substitute."
"Authoritative reference ... though very dense on information but very readable ..."
"This is a good intro book - wide coverage of topics."
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Best Optical Character Recognition Software

Optical Character Recognition: An Illustrated Guide to the Frontier (The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science)
Optical Character Recognition: An Illustrated Guide to the Frontier will pique the interest of users and developers of OCR products and desktop scanners, as well as teachers and students of pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and information retrieval. Optical Character Recognition: An Illustrated Guide to the Frontier is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and information retrieval, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.
Reviews
"For one thing the OCR software needs to analyze the stream of pixels, identify the relevant text blocks, figure out where the text lines are, find the words, then the individual characters, and then determine from the often noisy image block corresponding to the character what character the fuzzy blob in the picture really corresponds to. As an example, the string “rn” is often turned into the character “m” for many fonts almost regardless of what OCR system you use. However, this book was helpful to me, it is well organized, and I appreciated the nearly 300 visual examples, tables, and graphs, so I still recommend it to those with an interest in the field."
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Best Computer Science

Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems
Explore the machine learning landscape, particularly neural nets Use scikit-learn to track an example machine-learning project end-to-end Explore several training models, including support vector machines, decision trees, random forests, and ensemble methods Use the TensorFlow library to build and train neural nets Dive into neural net architectures, including convolutional nets, recurrent nets, and deep reinforcement learning Learn techniques for training and scaling deep neural nets Apply practical code examples without acquiring excessive machine learning theory or algorithm details. He was also a founder and CTO of Wifirst from 2002 to 2012, a leading Wireless ISP in France, and a founder and CTO of Polyconseil in 2001, the firm that now manages the electric car sharing service Autolib'.Before this he worked as an engineer in a variety of domains: finance (JP Morgan and Société Générale), defense (Canada's DOD), and healthcare (blood transfusion).
Reviews
"Even though I come from a strong theoretical background, I have to say one must do hands on tinkering to be able to solve one's own problem successfully. There are pieces of information hard to find somewhere else, and I have spent hundreds to thousands to attend workshops. I was hoping Keras, a high level api that enables fast experiments, is covered."
"I got this book for the deep learning portion (about half of the overall book length), and was shocked at the clarity of the conceptual explanations and code implementations."
"I'm only giving it four stars because despite the content itself being great, the print does have some issues like missing diagrams (see attached pictures)."
"The choice to start with Scikit-Learn was interesting, but makes sense on some level while he's introducing the more basic machine learning concepts. Simple machine learning techniques like logistic regression, data conditioning, dealing with training, validation, test set. Straightforward setup instructions, pretty intelligible explanation of the basic concepts (variables, placeholders, layers, etc.). The example code is quite good, and the notebooks are quite complete and seem to work well, with maybe a few tweaks and additional setup for some. Even just having a section on reinforcement learning is very rare in a book of this style, and Geron's samples and explanations are really solid."
"As with most technical books, it depends on where in the learning curve you are."
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Best Computer Neural Networks

Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems
Explore the machine learning landscape, particularly neural nets Use scikit-learn to track an example machine-learning project end-to-end Explore several training models, including support vector machines, decision trees, random forests, and ensemble methods Use the TensorFlow library to build and train neural nets Dive into neural net architectures, including convolutional nets, recurrent nets, and deep reinforcement learning Learn techniques for training and scaling deep neural nets Apply practical code examples without acquiring excessive machine learning theory or algorithm details. He was also a founder and CTO of Wifirst from 2002 to 2012, a leading Wireless ISP in France, and a founder and CTO of Polyconseil in 2001, the firm that now manages the electric car sharing service Autolib'.Before this he worked as an engineer in a variety of domains: finance (JP Morgan and Société Générale), defense (Canada's DOD), and healthcare (blood transfusion).
Reviews
"Even though I come from a strong theoretical background, I have to say one must do hands on tinkering to be able to solve one's own problem successfully. There are pieces of information hard to find somewhere else, and I have spent hundreds to thousands to attend workshops. I was hoping Keras, a high level api that enables fast experiments, is covered."
"I got this book for the deep learning portion (about half of the overall book length), and was shocked at the clarity of the conceptual explanations and code implementations."
"The choice to start with Scikit-Learn was interesting, but makes sense on some level while he's introducing the more basic machine learning concepts. Simple machine learning techniques like logistic regression, data conditioning, dealing with training, validation, test set. Straightforward setup instructions, pretty intelligible explanation of the basic concepts (variables, placeholders, layers, etc.). The example code is quite good, and the notebooks are quite complete and seem to work well, with maybe a few tweaks and additional setup for some. Even just having a section on reinforcement learning is very rare in a book of this style, and Geron's samples and explanations are really solid."
"As with most technical books, it depends on where in the learning curve you are."
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Best AI & Machine Learning

Deep Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series)
An introduction to a broad range of topics in deep learning, covering mathematical and conceptual background, deep learning techniques used in industry, and research perspectives. Deep learning is a form of machine learning that enables computers to learn from experience and understand the world in terms of a hierarchy of concepts. (Geoffrey Hinton FRS, Emeritus Professor, University of Toronto; Distinguished Research Scientist, Google). Deep learning has taken the world of technology by storm since the beginning of the decade. (Yann LeCun, Director of AI Research, Facebook; Silver Professor of Computer Science, Data Science, and Neuroscience, New York University). [T]he AI bible... the text should be mandatory reading by all data scientists and machine learning practitioners to get a proper foothold in this rapidly growing area of next-gen technology.
Reviews
"Because this book also makes very clear - is completely honest - that neural networks are a 'folk' technology (though they do not use those words): Neural networks work (in fact they work unbelievably well - at least, as Geoffrey Hinton himself has remarked, given unbelievably powerful computers), but the underlying theory is very limited and there is no reason to think that it will become less limited, and the lack of a theory means that there is no convincing 'gradient', to use an appropriate metaphor, for future development."
"The text does a very good job of informing the reader what has been done and was is being done for neural networks."
"Excellent overview."
"Great (and a very timely & relevant) book on this exciting and cutting edge domain."
"I am surprised by how poorly written this book is. I do not wish to speculate on the reason for this but it does sometimes does occur with. a first book in an important area or when dealing with pioneer authors with a cult following. More than half of this book reads like a bibliographic notes section of a book, and the authors seem. to be have no understanding of the didactic intention of a textbook (beyond a collation or importance sampling. of various topics). If you don't know linear algebra already, you cannot really hope to follow. anything (especially in the way the book is written). As a practical matter, Part I of the book is mostly redundant/off-topic for a neural network book. (containing linear algebra, probability, and so on). and Part III is written in a superficial way--so only a third of the book is remotely useful. It is understood that any machine learning book would have some mathematical sophistication, but the. main problem is caused by a lack of concern on part of the authors in promoting readability and an inability to. put themselves in reader shoes (surprisingly enough, some defensive responses to negative reviews tend to place. blame on math-phobic readers). A large part of the book (including restricted Boltzmann machines). is so tightly integrated with Probabilistic Graphical models (PGM), so that it loses its neural network focus. This portion is also in the latter part of the book that is written in a rather superficial way and. therefore it implicitly creates another prerequisite of being very used to PGM (sort-of knowing it wouldn't be enough). On the other hand, the PGM-heavy approach implicitly. increases the pre-requisites to include an even more advanced machine learning topic than neural networks. (with a 1200+ page book of its own). The book is an example of the fact that a first book in an important area with the name of. a pioneer author in it is not necessarily a qualification for being considered a good book."
"So…). If it’s for the people who want to get started with deep learning, it’s completely off topic, since it presents the mathematical nitty-gritty of the deep learning algorithms without mentioning any specifics of how to train a convo-net for example. If you’re really interested in Math behind Deep Learning out of curiousity (perhaps you’re a mathematician who wants to know what this deep learning thing is all about) perhaps this is a book for you."
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Best Software Coding Theory

Error Control Coding (2nd Edition)
A reorganized and comprehensive major revision of a classic book, this edition provides a bridge between introductory digital communications and more advanced treatment of information theory. In 1970 the first author published a book entitled An Introduction to Error-Correcting Codes, which presented the fundamentals of the previous two decades of work covering both block and convolutional codes. Other major additions included a comprehensive treatment of the error-detecting capabilities of block codes and an emphasis on soft decoding methods for convolutional codes. Three of these new developments stand out in particular: the application of binary convolutional and block codes to expanded (nonbinary) modulation alphabets, the development of practical soft decoding methods for block codes, and the discovery of soft-input, soft-output iterative decoding techniques for block and convolutional codes. A total of seven new chapters covering these topics have been added to this edition: two chapters on trellis- and block-coded modulation techniques, three chapters on soft decoding methods for block codes, and two chapters on turbo and low-density parity-check codes and iterative decoding. Chapters 3 through 10 cover in detail the fundamentals of block codes. Chapter 8 provides detailed coverage of majority-logic decodable codes, including the important classes of Euclidean and projective geometry codes. Chapter 9 develops the theory of the trellis structure of block codes, laying the groundwork for the introduction of trellis-based soft decoding algorithms in Chapter 14. Chapter 10, written by Professor Marc Fossorier, presents comprehensive coverage of reliability-based soft decoding methods for block codes and includes an introduction to iterative decoding techniques. Convolutional codes are introduced in Chapter 11, with the encoder state diagram serving as the basis for studying code structure and distance properties. Chapter 12 covers optimum decoding methods for convolutional codes, with an emphasis on the (maximum likelihood) Viterbi decoding algorithm for both hard and soft demodulator decisions. Chapter 13 covers suboptimum decoding methods for convolutional codes, with an emphasis on sequential decoding, using both the ZJ (stack) and Fano algorithms, and majority-logic decoding. Chapter 14 extends the soft decoding methods introduced for convolutional codes in Chapter 12 to block codes. This completely new chapter makes extensive use of the block code trellis structures introduced in Chapter 9. Chapter 15 discusses the important concepts of code concatenation, multistage decoding, and code decomposition. Chapter 16 introduces the area of parallel concatenation, or turbo coding, and its related iterative decoding techniques based on the BCJR algorithm presented in Chapter 12. Both block (Chapter 20) and convolutional (Chapter 21) burst-error-correcting codes are included. As a text the book can be used as the basis for a two-semester sequence in coding theory, with Chapters 1-10 on the fundamentals of block codes covered in one semester and the remaining chapters on convolutional codes and advanced block code topics in a second semester. Another possibility is to cover Chapters 1-8 and 11-13, which include the fundamentals of both block and convolutional codes, in one semester, followed by a second semester devoted to advanced topics. A course on block codes comprise Chapters 1-7 plus selected topics from Chapters 8-10, 14-15, 17, 19-20, and 22, whereas Chapters 1, 11-13, 16, 18, and 21 provide a thorough coverage of convolutional codes.
Reviews
"There are so many codes included in this book, and I am not interested in 'knowing' every code in the world, so for me the real world application is more important then I can choose a certain code to learn if I have limited time."
"At last a readable book on this important subject."
"Lin & Costello is the standard book on error correcting codes for a reason."
"I had the previous version of this book as my text at USC."
"Delicious reading, and presented a delicate math."
"Great book."
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Best Object-Oriented Software Design

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
These texts cover the design of object-oriented software and examine how to investigate requirements, create solutions and then translate designs into code, showing developers how to make practical use of the most significant recent developments. Design Patterns is a modern classic in the literature of object-oriented development, offering timeless and elegant solutions to common problems in software design.
Reviews
"Depending on on how you think of programming, this book could be incredibly insightful, or horribly abstract and impractical."
"I find it very interesting and it goes into details for design patterns and re-use of code."
"I have been using this book as a reference on Design Pattern."
"This book will forever stand as a foundation of software development."
"OK, so this title has become almost a bible for the software industry - it seems to get cited by every other author I read, so I thought it was about time I actually bought a copy."
"Even though I program in ABAP, it helps me to translate the pattern into that code."
"Great book for who want to understand each pattern deeply."
"Excelent book."
Find Best Price at Amazon

Best Artificial Intelligence & Semantics

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. Hofstadter's great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and 'strange loops') accessible and remarkably entertaining. Escher, Kurt Gödel: biographical information and work, artificial intelligence (AI) history and theories, strange loops and tangled hierarchies, formal and informal systems, number theory, form in mathematics, figure and ground, consistency, completeness, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, recursive structures, theories of meaning, propositional calculus, typographical number theory, Zen and mathematics, levels of description and computers; theory of mind: neurons, minds and thoughts; undecidability; self-reference and self-representation; Turing test for machine intelligence.
Reviews
"Some of the topics explored: artificial intelligence, cognitive science, mathematics, programming, consciousness, zen, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, genetics, physics, music, art, logic, infinity, paradox, self-similarity. Inbetween chapters, he switches to a dialogue format between fantasy characters; here he plays with the ideas being discussed, and performs postmodern literary experiments. GEB combines the playful spirit of Lewis Carroll, the labyrinthine madness of Borges, the structural perfectionism of Joyce, the elegant beauty of mathematics, and the quintessential fascination of mind, all under one roof. The task of reducing mind to math, of connecting the nature of consciousness to an idea in formal systems, is such a lofty goal, that even if true, the author could never rigorously prove this thesis, only approach it from every conceivable direction. In the grand line of reductionism, where we in theory reduce consciousness to cognitive science to neuroscience to biology to chemistry to physics to math to metamath, GEB positions itself at the wraparound point at unsigned infinity, where the opposite ends of the spectrum meet."
"There is sooo much content in this book it's going to take my whole life to even begin to understand."
"For those of you who want to know about how things are this is a must read."
"So far a fantastic book."
"If you are interested in fractals, improbable harmonies, math recursion, puzzles, artistic illusionary impossibilities and strange loopy weirdness where life seems to look back at itself."
"Book in great shape."
"Condition of book was good, not great, slightly worse than described but totally acceptable."
"arrived safe and sound."
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Best Natural Language Processing

Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems
Explore the machine learning landscape, particularly neural nets Use scikit-learn to track an example machine-learning project end-to-end Explore several training models, including support vector machines, decision trees, random forests, and ensemble methods Use the TensorFlow library to build and train neural nets Dive into neural net architectures, including convolutional nets, recurrent nets, and deep reinforcement learning Learn techniques for training and scaling deep neural nets Apply practical code examples without acquiring excessive machine learning theory or algorithm details.
Reviews
"I got this book for the deep learning portion (about half of the overall book length), and was shocked at the clarity of the conceptual explanations and code implementations."
"Even though I come from a strong theoretical background, I have to say one must do hands on tinkering to be able to solve one's own problem successfully. There are pieces of information hard to find somewhere else, and I have spent hundreds to thousands to attend workshops. I was hoping Keras, a high level api that enables fast experiments, is covered."
"Great book, takes a while to get going, but shows some excellent uses of scikit learn."
"Book content is very up-to-date and offers great hands-on experience."
"Great Book, well explained a lot of good examples, one of those books that the more times you read it , the more you profit from it."
"The choice to start with Scikit-Learn was interesting, but makes sense on some level while he's introducing the more basic machine learning concepts. Simple machine learning techniques like logistic regression, data conditioning, dealing with training, validation, test set. Straightforward setup instructions, pretty intelligible explanation of the basic concepts (variables, placeholders, layers, etc.). The example code is quite good, and the notebooks are quite complete and seem to work well, with maybe a few tweaks and additional setup for some. Even just having a section on reinforcement learning is very rare in a book of this style, and Geron's samples and explanations are really solid."
"As with most technical books, it depends on where in the learning curve you are."
Find Best Price at Amazon

Best Machine Theory

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. Hofstadter's great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and 'strange loops') accessible and remarkably entertaining. Escher, Kurt Gödel: biographical information and work, artificial intelligence (AI) history and theories, strange loops and tangled hierarchies, formal and informal systems, number theory, form in mathematics, figure and ground, consistency, completeness, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, recursive structures, theories of meaning, propositional calculus, typographical number theory, Zen and mathematics, levels of description and computers; theory of mind: neurons, minds and thoughts; undecidability; self-reference and self-representation; Turing test for machine intelligence.
Reviews
"Some of the topics explored: artificial intelligence, cognitive science, mathematics, programming, consciousness, zen, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, genetics, physics, music, art, logic, infinity, paradox, self-similarity. Inbetween chapters, he switches to a dialogue format between fantasy characters; here he plays with the ideas being discussed, and performs postmodern literary experiments. GEB combines the playful spirit of Lewis Carroll, the labyrinthine madness of Borges, the structural perfectionism of Joyce, the elegant beauty of mathematics, and the quintessential fascination of mind, all under one roof. The task of reducing mind to math, of connecting the nature of consciousness to an idea in formal systems, is such a lofty goal, that even if true, the author could never rigorously prove this thesis, only approach it from every conceivable direction. In the grand line of reductionism, where we in theory reduce consciousness to cognitive science to neuroscience to biology to chemistry to physics to math to metamath, GEB positions itself at the wraparound point at unsigned infinity, where the opposite ends of the spectrum meet."
"There is sooo much content in this book it's going to take my whole life to even begin to understand."
"For those of you who want to know about how things are this is a must read."
"So far a fantastic book."
"If you are interested in fractals, improbable harmonies, math recursion, puzzles, artistic illusionary impossibilities and strange loopy weirdness where life seems to look back at itself."
"Book in great shape."
"Condition of book was good, not great, slightly worse than described but totally acceptable."
"arrived safe and sound."
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Best Artificial Intelligence Expert Systems

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
In The Master Algorithm , Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone. "Pedro Domingos demystifies machine learning and shows how wondrous and exciting the future will be. "Domingos is the perfect tour guide from whom you will learn everything you need to know about this exciting field, and a surprising amount about science and philosophy as well. "[An] enthusiastic but not dumbed-down introduction to machine learning... lucid and consistently informative... With wit, vision, and scholarship, Domingos describes how these scientists are creating programs that allow a computer to teach itself. "This book is a must have to learn machine learning without equation.
Reviews
"Other books describe the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning, but this book goes further in describing how, say, decisions trees, support vector machines and deep neural networks fit compared to each other and within which subfields statistics play a larger role than others. The book also puts many techniques in historical perspective that I found very helpful, such as the rise, fall and rise again of deep neural networks with support vector machines taking a lead as the hottest technique in between (while also making clear that SVMs are a useful technique with unique strengths today)."
"Helped me put the subject into a broad perspective seeing how different aspects relate to each other."
"Good to read for both ML experts or newbies."
"This is a great book!"
"This is a nice book that gives you a glimpse of what is AI and how is being used in society."
"Great book for helping me "refresh" my knowledge of AI from when I got an advanced degree in Computer Science -- many years ago."
"Excellent overview of machine learning."
"So much of our lives are being controlled by algorithms; its key to understand what makes them tick so as to stay in control of my choices."
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