Best book and tool for practical Machine Learning

As I move from courses and theory in ML and AI to application, I’m looking for practical examples and tools.

I’ve recently purchased the new book from Manning Publications – Machine Learning in Action. For those who want a practical introduction to ML, this is the book! Math is kept at a minimum with a focus on application.  It’s written around using python as the tool of choice … Python is the perfect language for machine learning because of the free rich tools like NumPy and SciPy .

You can certainly assemble and build your own “pylab” to use with the book but there is a great package available.., check out Enthought‘s free EDP..

http://www.enthought.com/products/epd_free.php

It’s pre-packages everything you’ll need ..

SCIPY, NUMPY, IPYTHON, MATPLOTLIB, TRAITS, & CHACO

Once you’ve developed an application in Python, you can move to C, C++ or Java for optimization and packaging your specific application. Some of my targets will be on the Arduino, which I’ll share the entire development and code.

Enjoy,

Jim