How This Book Is Organized

Machine learning blends concepts and techniques from many different traditional fields, such as mathematics, statistics, and computer science. As such, there are many ways to learn the discipline. Considering its theoretical foundations in mathematics and statistics, newcomers would do well to attain some degree of mastery of the formal specifications of basic machine learning techniques. There are many excellent books that focus on the fundamentals, the classic work being Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman’s The Elements of Statistical Learning (HTF09; full references can be found in the Works Cited).^[1] But another important part of the hacker mantra is to learn by doing. Many hackers may be more comfortable thinking of problems in terms of the process by which a solution is attained, rather than the theoretical foundation from which the solution is derived.