Joel Grus

If you are looking for arguments in this book to counter the claims of religion, don't bother. Look at it as a book of humor taking a swipe at religious pretensions. In that sense it works - some of the time. There are many humorous things in here, but they are swaddled in a lardy coating of smug glibness - or is that glib smugness? - that can be very offputting, not because I believe no one should ever mock religions, but because I believe at some point that mockery should be honest, and a show more great deal of this is not honest, it is just childish. In addition, the section on things that aren't religions but start to seem like them (I am paraphrasing here), which includes things like D&D and Deepak Chopra, has some real clunkers - mainly, sticking a scientific field (Environmental Science) into the mix and declaring the entire thing false. There are some aspects of environmentalism that can readily be challenged as a religion, and he does bring in Gaia worship, which is what I am referring to, but he attributes that to all people who deal with environmental issues, and brushes away all environmental science with a wave of his hand as wanting to destroy the economy and starve poor people. He makes no actual argument against the piles of evidence for the one evidentiary field he mocks, while skewering all the evolution deniers who do the same thing with the field of science they do not like.

So if you pick up this book, be sure you approach it as what it is - a glib dismissal of religions without doing the hard work to demonstrate how any of them are false. He makes pronouncements rather than presents evidence, so you shouldn't hand this book to any religious friend to help you win an argument (which the author proposes a couple of times you do). The gems of humor that are in the book gained it almost all the rating I gave. show less

A toungue in cheek and irreverent, yet surprisingly comprehensive and useful analisys of religious follies. It even addresses such recent developments as Pastafarianism (followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster - see Wikipedia), and comes to all the right conclusions via a humerous road less travelled. Definitely worth owning!

Ambitious, but uneven, made me think of the 'how to draw an owl' meme at part. The most interesting aspect might have been the author's functional Python. The "For Further Exploration" sections have some really interesting links.

This is a very basic into topics in statistics and machine learning built around functioning code to perform (some of!) the tasks and algorithms discussed.

As an introduction it seemed very solid. I was looking for something a little more in depth, so this was not really the book I was looking for. What am I looking for? Something that bridges between a working knowledge of e.g. some methods in scikit learn to e.g. coding those methods, from scratch. Gradient descent and PCA are covered, but show more the book stops precisely at 'more interesting'/complex methods e.g. ridge regression/Lasso, and never even touches on e.g. ICA.

So, 3-ish stars for me. Maybe 4 stars if you are getting your feet wet for the first time. show less