I got most of the books I wanted the most for Christmas this year. It was a great haul that will keep me busy for a while. Among them were:
- Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications
- Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology
- Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment
- Introduction to Evolutionary Computing (Natural Computing Series)
The books on string and tree algorithms and collective intelligence should be self-explanatory. The book on data visualization I wanted because it was an overlooked skill in my education. I appreciate great data visualizations and taking some steps to improve my understanding and increase my skills in that area is worth doing. Finally the book on evolutionary computing is for personal enrichment. I’ve been playing around with genetic algorithms since 1994, even before I got out of high school. It’s always been playing, though, and I wanted a bit of a more rigorous introduction to them.
With any luck, I’ll be posting some thoughts on these books in the coming months.
That’s funny, I recently used “Processing” to send results from a web feed to the Arduino, but I had never heard of it before last week.
Exciting haul of books! (Books rock!) :)
That sounds like some seriously heavy reading.