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
Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Data Analysis uses a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.
Michael Milton likes books. Before his first day of high school wrestling, he checked out a stack of books on technique from the library and practiced on his not-terribly-enthusiastic little sister. Then he spent the first few minutes of tryouts kicking the butts of other newbies, until the experienced wrestlers realized how much fun it would be to kick his. Within a few months, he became a decent wrestler, but he always stayed a bit ahead of the other newbies because of those books.
His life has consisted of gleefully going through that process over and over again in completely unrelated fields. Naturally, he's a Head First fanatic.
Until recently Michael spent most of time looking at databases to help nonprofit organizations figure out how to make more money. He has a degree in philosophy from New College of Florida and one in religious ethics from Yale University. When he's not in the library or the bookstore, you can find him in-line skating, taking pictures, and brewing beer.
Comments about O'Reilly Media Head First Data Analysis:
The best thing about this book is how it uses real-world marketing questions to unlock the concepts and techniques behind practical data analysis.
That's a reverse -- and far superior -- approach to conventional reference books, which provide definitions and concepts, but no practical guidance on how to apply them (it's like trying to learn to write by being handed a dictionary).
The problems in each chapter are presented in the form of a memo from a higher-up who wants an answer to a vaguely-stated question. The chapter breaks down the vague memo into specific, actionable tasks, and shows you how to use different statistical tools to coax insights out of a collection of data.
What's more, the book encourages the reader to apply critical thinking skills at each stage of analysis -- probably the most important quality a good data analyst can have.
The style makes for a nice balance between the dense examples-only format of O'Reilly's Cookbook series, and the definition-laden format of a conventional reference book.
The only ding against the book is that it doesn't appear to have been given a proofreader's eye before publication.
It's peppered with errors in the form of numerous typos, sloppy arithmetic, and careless, rote copying-and-pasting of formulas and text blocks that weren't appropriately edited before reuse.
These problems will lure some readers off-track by reversing the meaning of some equations, and bringing into question how some results were obtained, since following the badly-edited examples clearly won't yield anything close to the correct answers.
So readers will have to apply their critical thinking skills just to parse some of the presented material so it makes sense, and not take all of it at face value.
The spate of errors is the only thing that prevented me from giving this book 5 stars.
7/21/2010
(1 of 4 customers found this review helpful)
5.0
If you work with data, read it
By Guille
from BCN
Pros
Easy to understand
Helpful examples
Cons
Best Uses
Comments about O'Reilly Media Head First Data Analysis:
This book shows different ways of extract useful information from raw data. Is the only book I know that get to do it without sleep sheep.
