New Data Analysis Book
A new book on data analysis was released yesterday by Michael Milton called Head First Data Analysis. The Head First books have gotten rave reviews and I’ve never actually read one until now. I was able to be involved in the technical review of this book, which gave me a first glimpse into the content. I will say there were a few of pleasant surprises as I went from chapter to chapter. Some of them being; exercises that utilized the open source statistical program R, examples using relevant data, theories and ideas, and simply hitting on all the major topics without going so deep it was no longer relevant. I also liked the fact that almost anyone could pick up this book and start applying the concepts immediately. It is designed for a very easy read with rich content. Here is a note from Amazon that describes what this book is about:
“Today, interpreting data is a critical decision-making factor for businesses and organizations. If your job requires you to manage and analyze all kinds of data, turn to Head First Data Analysis, where you’ll quickly learn how to collect and organize data, sort the distractions from the truth, find meaningful patterns, draw conclusions, predict the future, and present your findings to others.
Whether you’re a product developer researching the market viability of a new product or service, a marketing manager gauging or predicting the effectiveness of a campaign, a salesperson who needs data to support product presentations, or a lone entrepreneur responsible for all of these data-intensive functions and more, the unique approach in Head First Data Analysis is by far the most efficient way to learn what you need to know to convert raw data into a vital business tool.
You’ll learn how to:
- Determine which data sources to use for collecting information
- Assess data quality and distinguish signal from noise
- Build basic data models to illuminate patterns, and assimilate new information into the models
- Cope with ambiguous information
- Design experiments to test hypotheses and draw conclusions
- Use segmentation to organize your data within discrete market groups
- Visualize data distributions to reveal new relationships and persuade others
- Predict the future with sampling and probability models
- Clean your data to make it useful
- Communicate the results of your analysis to your audience ” [source]
I think the Head First series methodology and design creates an experience where the reader is able to learn and apply the concepts quickly. It was a pleasure working with the folks at O’Reilly.
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