I hate to be high brow here, but I'm just waiting for O'Reilly to release Brain Surgery for Hackers. Some things are just better learned the hard way, sitting down and getting a more thorough introduction.
This Machine Learning in Action from Manning uses python instead of R:
<a href="http://www.manning.com/pharrington/" rel="nofollow">http://www.manning.com/pharrington/</a><p>PS. Attended Machine Learning class in hacker dojo with the author, he's a bright guy. Hopefully the book will be as good.
I would love to know more about this book but it seems to not be released yet and there are no reviews. Not sure what the point of posting it is or why it is up voted. More details would be great.
Have interacted with both authors, however briefly. These are both smart guys operating outside of the typical CS fields who have figured out how to apply cutting edge computational techniques to their specialties and deliver meaningful insight. Really looking forward to reading the book.
Just a quick note if you're interested, this book is similar and is an absolutely fantastic 'applied beginner' ML book "Programming Collective Intelligence"<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Building-Applications/dp/0596529325/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328721596&sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...</a>
This seems like a field that could pretty easily be commodified. I can imagine a service like the Google prediction API could meet the needs for this kind of tech for many companies.<p>So while it's certainly an interesting field, I wonder how many hackers are really going to need these skills.