13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Overall, a very good hands-on book for learning data mining, Jan 27 2004
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Data Mining: A Tutorial Based Primer (Paperback)
The book does a good job covering basic data mining terminology and concepts, and provides introductory, but still subtantial coverage of the most common data mining methods.
Positives: a trial version of the easy-to-use Excel-based iDA tool is included with the book, which allows the reader to reproduce the examples (very helpful for understanding the text). iDA may also be used to complete many of the well thought out exercises provided at the end of each chapter. Working with the hands-on examples and exercises is an excellent way to learn data mining, and due to this, the book provides unique and excellent value.
Negatives: the order of topics and chapters seems rather disorganized; topics are often (surprisingly) repeated and the overall structure of the book doesn't seem to make sense at times. But if you read each chapter more or less independently, this isn't a serious problem. The iDA tool that comes with the text is a trial, 180-day version, and it is unlikely that the average reader will want to spend $5,000 to purchase a license for the commercial product after the six month trial is up. So you should buy the book knowing ahead of time that after a while, the iDA tool will no longer be available to go back over the examples or exercises.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very good choice for learning data mining concepts with minimal resources, Oct 12 2005
By Dut - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Data Mining: A Tutorial Based Primer (Paperback)
The particularity of this book is that it is more accessible to read than most of data mining books, which in general require some maths/statistics/computing background.
The book is not written in the best way from the point of view of a data mining expert, as for instance sometimes a theme is recurrent in the text, but it is not obvious to explain data mining concepts using minimal previous knowledge in computing/maths/statistics.
A second important positive aspect is that the book comes with a software (IDA) running under Excel, which can be used to illustrate the techniques presented in the book (BTW a new version of the software is freely available to download, regularly). This is not the case with most of the data mining books. So if you wish to learn the basics of data mining with minimal or no previous resources (good maths/computing background and access to expensive data mining software) then this is a very good choice.
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unique approach and many insights, Feb 16 2003
By Paulo C. Rios Jr. - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Data Mining: A Tutorial Based Primer (Paperback)
Using an Excel-based tool to provide a hands-on approach, this book covers diverse areas in data mining from statistical patterns to data warehousing to the semantic web. Easy to read and with many insights.