Is it worth purchasing Mahout in Action to get up to speed with Mahout, or are there other better sources?

Question

I'm currently a very casual user of Apache Mahout, and I'm considering purchasing the book Mahout in Action. Unfortunately, I'm having a really hard time getting an idea of how worth it this book is -- and seeing as it's a Manning Early Access Program book (and therefore only currently available as a beta-version e-book), I can't take a look myself in a bookstore.

Can anyone recommend this as a good (or less good) guide to getting up to speed with Mahout, and/or other sources that can supplement the Mahout website?

Answer 1

Speaking as a Mahout committer and co-author of the book, I think it is worth it. ;-)

But seriously, what are you working on? Maybe we can point you to some resources.

Some aspects of Mahout are just plain hard to figure out on your own. We work hard at answering questions on the mailing list, but it can really help to have sample code and a roadmap. Without some of that, it is hard to even ask a good question.

Answer 2

Also a co-author here. Being "from the horse's mouth" it's probably by far the most complete write-up out there for Mahout itself. There are some good blog posts out there, and certainly plenty of good books on more generally machine learning (I like Collective Intelligence in Action as a broad light intro). [email protected] has a few people that say they like the book FWIW, as do the book forums (http://www.manning-sandbox.com/forum.jspa?forumID=623) I think you can return the e-book if it's not quite what you wanted. It definitely has 6 chapters on clustering.