Big Data Bibliography

Compiled by the Safari Books Online Content Team

Copyright © 2011 Safari Books Online

Introduction

The exponentially decreasing costs of data storage have made the cost of recording and storing data almost free, and certainly convenient for us all to take advantage of. Events previously deemed unworthy of recording are yielding valuable insights for existing businesses and sprouting whole new industries. Recording data and later analyzing it isn’t just for the entrepreneurial spirit, since it does result in some amazing discoveries. In business and government, organizations leveraging data-based decisions are more successful than those relying on decades of trial-and-error. To make these data based decisions, the data needs to be collected, processed and distilled in a manner humans can understand. It is the IT department that is responsible for connecting these data pipes and separating the signal from the noise.

Those involved in data wrangling would have easier jobs if the processing power of a single machine could keep up with the size of the data they needed to process. The fact is it hasn’t, and over the past decade a new field of big data has emerged. This big data field is focused on reliably processing massive amounts of data. Processing large amounts of data has been done in the past, but what is new this time around is that it’s being done on commodity hardware and open-source software tools.

We have chosen a selection of the most useful books for data analysis in this bibliography. These start from high level concepts of business intelligence, data analysis and data mining. The list then works its way down to the tools needed for number crunching mathematical toolkits, machine learning, and natural language processing. In order to implement these concepts beyond the “toy” stage, infrastructure tools are covered in Cloud Services and Infrastructure and Amazon Web Services. Finally big data tools that can be deployed in the cloud or locally are covered in the Hadoop, and NoSqL Data Stores section.

Chapter 1. Data Analysis

This a broad category that serves as an introduction to the process of making data-based decisions. This category covers basic analysis using simple tools such as: Excel and SQL.

Data Analysis with Open Source Tools

By Philipp K. Janert

O’Reilly Media, November 2010

ISBN: 9781449389802

538 pages, $39.99 US

In this book, Philipp Janert teaches you how to approach data analysis problems and extract all of the information available from your data. Collecting data is relatively easy, but turning raw information into something useful requires that you know how to extract precisely what you need. With this insightful book, intermediate to experienced programmers interested in data analysis will learn techniques for working with data in a business environment. You’ll learn how to look at data to discover what it contains, how to capture those ideas in conceptual models, and how to feed your understanding back into the organization through business plans, metrics dashboards, and other applications. Above all, you’ll learn how to think about the results you want to achieve, rather than rely on tools to think for you.

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Head First Data Analysis

By Michael Milton

O’Reilly Media, July 2009

ISBN: 9780596806224

496 pages, $49.99 US

Interpreting data is a critical decision-making factor for businesses and organizations. Use this book to 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, this book will help you learn how to convert raw data into a vital business tool. Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, this book is designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.

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Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel

By Gordon S. Linoff

John Wiley & Sons, October 2007

ISBN: 9780470099513

744 pages, $45.00 US

In this book, one of the leading experts on business data mining shows you how to leverage SQL and Excel to perform sophisticated types of business analysis, without the expense of data mining tools and consultants. Each chapter discusses why and when to perform a particular type of business analysis to obtain a useful business result, with helpful tips and hints, and how to design and perform the analysis using SQL and Excel, including what the results look like in SQL and Excel.

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Microsoft Excel 2010: Data Analysis and Business Modeling

By Wayne L. Winston

Microsoft Press, January 2011

ISBN: 9780735656864

720 pages, $49.99 US

This book will help you master the data analysis and modeling techniques in Excel 2010 that help you transform data into bottom-line results. These materials have been tested while teaching thousands of analysts working for Fortune 500 corporations and government agencies, including the U.S. Army. In this book you’ll learn about statistics, forecasting, optimization models, Monte Carlo simulation, inventory modeling, and the mathematics of waiting in line. You will also learn about some recent developments in business thinking, such as real options, customer value, and mathematical pricing models. You will even learn how to predict U.S. presidential elections, how to set football point spreads, how to determine the probability of winning at craps, and how to determine the probability of a specific team winning an NCAA tournament. These examples are interesting and fun, and they teach you a lot about solving business problems with Excel.

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Access Data Analysis Cookbook

By Ken Bluttman; Wayne S. Freeze

O’Reilly Media, May 2007

ISBN: 9780596101220

368 pages, $49.99 US

This book offers practical recipes to solve a variety of common problems that users have with extracting Access data and performing calculations on it. Each recipe includes a discussion on how and why the solution works. Whether you use Access 2007 or an earlier version, this book will teach you new methods to query data, different ways to move data in and out of Access, and how to calculate answers to financial and investment issues. Learn how to apply statistics to summarize business information, how to jump beyond SQL by manipulating data with VBA, how to process dates and times, and even how to reach into the Excel data analysis toolkit. This book is a one-stop-shop for extracting nuggets of valuable information from your database, and anyone with Access experience will benefit from these tips and techniques, including seasoned developers. If you want to use your data, and not just store it, you’ll find this guide indispensable.

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Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT

By John Ward

Packt Publishing, February 2008

ISBN: 9781847191090

312 pages, $39.99 US

BIRT, which stands for Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools, is a collection of development tools and technologies used for report development utilizing the BIRT framework. This book focuses on the most visible and familiar product built with the BIRT framework, which is the BIRT Report Designer. The BIRT Report Designer is an Eclipse plug-in that utilizes BIRT technologies to allow users to design reports in the BIRT document format. You can integrate it with your Java/J2EE applications to produce compelling reports. This book is a concise and practical guide aimed at getting the results you want as quickly as possible. It steers you through each point of reporting from setup, to scripting, designing, formatting, and deploying BIRT reports using a common example that runs through the book. This book is for Java developers who want to create rich reports and get started with BIRT to do this.

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JMP Start Statistics: A Guide to Statistics and Data Analysis Using JMP

By John Sall; Lee Creighton; Ann Lehman

SAS Publishing, September 2007

ISBN: 9781599945729

628 pages, $59.95 US

This book is an introduction to analyzing data using JMP statistical discovery software from SAS. A mix of software manual and statistics text, this book provides hands-on tutorials with just the right amount of conceptual and motivational material to illustrate how to use JMP’s intuitive interface for data analysis. Each chapter features concept-specific tutorials, examples, brief reviews of concepts, step-by-step illustrations, and exercises. A few of the techniques in this book are not found in most introductory statistics courses, but are accessible in basic form using JMP. These techniques include logistic regression, correspondence analysis, principal components with biplots, leverage plots, and density estimation. All of these techniques are used in the service of understanding other, more basic methods.

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Excel Data Analysis: Your visual blueprint for creating and analyzing data, charts, and PivotTables, 3rd Edition

By Denise Etheridge

Visual, July 2010

ISBN: 9780470591604

368 pages, $29.99 US

Crunch and analyze Excel data the way the professionals do with this clean, uncluttered, visual guide to advanced Excel techniques. Using numerous screenshots and easy-to-follow numbered steps, this book clearly shows you how to perform professional-level modeling, charting, data access, data slicing, and other functions. You’ll find super techniques for getting the most out of Excel’s statistical and financial functions, Excel PivotTables and PivotCharts. It includes practical examples, tips, and advice to help you get the most out of Excel’s features and functions. Follow along and earn Excel at the highest levels with this practical guide.

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Practical Data Analysis with JMP

By Robert Carver

SAS Publishing, July 2010

ISBN: 9781607644750

396 pages, $49.95 US

This book provides a powerful interactive and visual approach of JMP, introducing readers to the logic and methods of statistical thinking and data analysis. It includes a myriad of examples and problems that rely on real sets of data, often starting with an important or interesting research question that an investigator has pursued. The chapters are organized around core statistical concepts rather than software commands, menus, or features. And most of the data sets in this book are real and are drawn from those disciplines whose practitioners are the primary users of JMP software.

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Visual Six Sigma: Making Data Analysis Lean

By Ian Cox; Marie A. Gaudard; Philip J. Ramsey; Mia L. Stephens; Leo Wright

John Wiley & Sons December 2009

ISBN: 9780470506912

504 pages, $49.95 US

In the typical business environment of process improvement, you want simple-to-use tools that everyone can use at all levels to rapidly explore and interpret data. This book helps you use your own data to drive incredible improvement within your business. It is divided into three parts: background, case studies, and JMP highlights. Broaden and deepen your application of Six Sigma thinking within your organization with the intuitive and easy to use tools detailed in this book.

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Categorical Data Analysis Using The SAS System, 2nd Edition

Maura E. Stokes; Charles S. Davis; Gary G. Koch

SAS Publishing June 2000

ISBN: 9781580257107

648 pages, $67.95 US

Statisticians and researchers will find this book essential with its discussion of categorical data analysis techniques and tips on applying these methods with SAS. Practical examples from a broad range of applications illustrate the use of the FREQ, LOGISTIC, GENMOD, and CATMOD procedures in a variety of analyses. Other procedures discussed include the PHREG and NPAR1WAY procedures. Topics discussed include assessing association in contingency tables and sets of tables, logistic regression and conditional logistic regression, and more. This second edition has been revised for use with SAS 8. New topics include additional exact tests, generalized estimating equations, use of the CLASS statement in the LOGISTIC procedure, exact logistic regression using the LOGISTIC procedure, and comparisons of the use of subject-specific models versus population-averaged models.

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Chapter 2. Data Mining

This is an introduction to advanced techniques of data analysis. This section introduces readers into areas where data mining is currently being used, as well as tools for doing data mining.

Programming Collective Intelligence

By Toby Segaran

O’Reilly Media, August 2007

ISBN: 9780596529321

368 pages, $39.99 US

Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you’ve found it. This book takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application.

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Mining the Social Web

By Matthew A. Russell

O’Reilly Media, February 2011

ISBN: 9781449394752

360 pages, $39.99 US

Popular social networks such as Facebook and Twitter generate a tremendous amount of valuable data on topics and use patterns. This concise and practical book shows you how to harvest and analyze data using social web APIs, Python, and pragmatic storage technologies such as Redis, CouchDB, and NetworkX. Algorithms are designed with robustness and efficiency in mind so that the approaches scale well on an ordinary piece of commodity hardware. This book is highly readable from cover to cover as content progressively grows in complexity, but also lends itself to being read in an ad-hoc fashion. Get a concise and straightforward synopsis of some practical technologies from the semantic web landscape that you can incorporate into your analysis as well.

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Algorithms of the Intelligent Web

By Haralambos Marmanis; Dmitry Babenko

Manning Publications, May 2009

ISBN: 9781933988665

368 pages, $44.99 US

This book is an example-driven blueprint for creating applications that collect, analyze, and act on the massive quantities of data users leave in their wake as they use the web. With it you’ll learn how to build Amazon- and Netflix-style recommendation engines, and learn how the same techniques apply to people matches on social-networking sites. You can even see how click-trace analysis can result in smarter ad rotations. With a plethora of examples and extensive detail, this book shows you how to build Web 2.0 applications that are as smart as your users.

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Data Mining with Microsoft SQL Server 2008

By Jamie MacLennan, ZhaoHui Tang and Bogdan Crivat

John Wiley & Sons, November 2008

ISBN: 9780470277744

672 pages, $50.00 US

Understand how to use the new features of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for data mining by using the tools in this book, which show you how to use the SQL Server Data Mining Toolset with Office 2007 to mine and analyze data. Explore each of the major data mining algorithms, including naive bayes, decision trees, time series, clustering, association rules, and neural networks. Learn more about topics like mining OLAP databases, data mining with SQL Server Integration Services 2008, and using Microsoft data mining to solve business analysis problems. This is the most authoritative book on data mining with SQL Server 2008.

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Practical Applications of Data Mining

By Sang C. Suh

Jones & Bartlett Learning, January 2011

ISBN: 9780763785871

420 pages, $82.95 US

This book emphasizes both theory and the applications of data mining algorithms. Various topics of data mining techniques are identified and described throughout, including clustering, association rules, rough set theory, probability theory, neural networks, classification, and fuzzy logic. Each of these techniques is explored with a theoretical introduction and its effectiveness is demonstrated with various chapter examples. This book will help any database and IT professional understand how to apply data mining techniques to real-world problems.

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Data Mining For Business Intelligence: Concepts, Techniques, and Applications in Microsoft Office Excel with XLMiner, Second Edition

By Galit Shmueli; Nitin R. Patel; Peter C. Bruce

John Wiley & Sons, October 2010

ISBN: 9780470526828

428 pages, $120 US

This book uses real data and actual cases to illustrate the applicability of data mining (DM) intelligence in the development of successful business models. Featuring complimentary access to XLMiner, the Microsoft Office Excel add-in, this book allows readers to follow along and implement algorithms at their own speed, with a minimal learning curve. In addition, students and practitioners of DM techniques are presented with hands-on, business-oriented applications. An abundant amount of exercises and examples, now doubled in number in the second edition, are provided to motivate learning and understanding. This book helps readers understand the beneficial relationship that can be established between DM and smart business practices, and is an excellent learning tool for creating valuable strategies and making wiser business decisions.

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Introduction to Data Mining: Using SAS Enterprise Miner

By Patricia B. Cerrito

SAS Publishing, November 2006

ISBN: 9781590478295

488 pages, $89.95 US

This book is packed with examples from an array of industries, and provides you with excellent starting points and practical guidelines to begin data mining today. The author encourages you to think of data mining as a process of exploration rather than as a collection of tools to investigate data. In that way, you choose the methods that will extract the most information from your data, and, while there are no right answers to investigating data sets, there are many questions that can be asked to produce meaningful results. Each answer then creates a path that helps you drill down to explore the data fully. It is up to you to determine what is of interest and what is important to analyze.

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Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Technologies

By David Taniar

IGI Global, January 2008

ISBN: 9781599049601

379 pages, $99.95 US

As information technology continues to advance in massive increments, the bank of information available from personal, financial, and business electronic transactions and all other electronic documentation and data storage is growing at an exponential rate. With this wealth of information comes the opportunity and necessity to use this information to maintain a competitive advantage and process information effectively in real-world situations. This book presents researchers and practitioners with comprehensive, innovative research on data mining methods, structures, tools, and methods.

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Decision Trees for Business Intelligence and Data Mining: Using SAS Enterprise Miner

By Barry de Ville

SAS Publishing, October 2006

ISBN: 9781590475676

240 pages, $49.95 US

This book illustrates the application and operation of decision trees in business intelligence, data mining, business analytics, prediction, and knowledge discovery. It explains in detail the use of decision trees as a data mining technique and how this technique complements and supplements data mining approaches such as regression, as well as other business intelligence applications that incorporate tabular reports, OLAP, or multidimensional cubes. Examples show how various aspects of decision trees are constructed, how they operate, how to interpret them, and how to use them in a range of predictive and descriptive applications. The examples are drawn from the areas of purchase behavior, risk assessment, and business-to-business marketing. This book also describes the various disciplines that contributed to the development of decision trees and how, even today, decision trees can be used as a form of machine intelligence.

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Temporal and Spatio-Temporal Data Mining

By Wynne Hsu; Mong Li Lee; Junmei Wang

IGI Global, July 2007

ISBN: 9781599043876

292 pages, $99.95 US

This book examines the problem of mining topological patterns in spatio-temporal databases by imposing the temporal constraints into the process of mining spatial collocation patterns. It presents probable solutions when discovering the spatial sequence patterns by incorporating the spatial information into the sequence of patterns, and introduces two new classes of spatial sequence patterns: flow patterns and generalized spatio-temporal patterns. This innovative book addresses different scenarios when finding complex relationships in spatio-temporal data by modeling them as graphs, giving readers a comprehensive synopsis on two successful partition-based algorithms designed by the authors.

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Data Mining and Medical Knowledge Management: Cases and Applications

By Petr Berka; Jan Rauch; Djamel Abdelkader Zighed

IGI Global, February 2009

ISBN: 9781605662183

464 pages, $225 US

This book presents 20 case studies on applications of various modern data mining methods in several important areas of medicine. It covers classical data mining methods, elaborated approaches related to mining in electroencephalogram and electrocardiogram data, and even methods related to mining in genetic data.

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Intelligent Soft Computation and Evolving Data Mining: Integrating Advanced Technologies

By Leon Shyue-Liang Wang; Tzung-Pei Hong

IGI Global, March 2010

ISBN: 9781615207572

516 pages, $180 US

This book provides a reference to researchers, practitioners, and students in both soft computing and data mining communities, forming a foundation for the development of the field. It integrates contrasting techniques of conventional hard computing and soft computing to exploit the tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty, partial truth, and approximation to achieve tractability, robustness and low-cost solution.

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Building Intelligent .NET Applications: Agents, Data Mining, Rule-Based Systems, and Speech Processing

By Sara Morgan Rea

Addison-Wesley Professional, March 2005

ISBN: 9780321246264

312 pages, $54.99

This book is an introduction to the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for .NET programmers. It is the first book to show professional .NET developers how to incorporate AI into their daily programming. In this accessible guide, developers will learn how to enhance both new and existing .NET applications with intelligent agents, data mining, rule-based systems, and speech processing. The author explores four of the most popular AI technologies by building real-world sample applications that readers can use as the basis for their own applications. With the help of this book, developers will learn the basic technologies of AI needed to create practical, time-saving enterprise applications.

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Data Mining Applications for Empowering Knowledge Societies

By Hakikur Rahman

IGI Global, July 2008

ISBN: 9781599046570

356 pages, $180 US

This book presents an overview of the main issues of data mining, including its classification, regression, clustering, and ethical issues. This comprehensive book also provides readers with knowledge enhancing processes as well as a wide spectrum of data mining applications.

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Social and Political Implications of Data Mining: Knowledge Management in E-Government

By Hakikur Rahman

IGI Global, February 2009

ISBN: 9781605662305

378 pages, $195 US

This book focuses on the data mining and knowledge management implications that lie within online government. This significant reference book contains cases for the improvement of governance systems, the enhancement of security techniques, and the empowerment of citizens and societies. It covers the data mining and knowledge management implications that lie within online government.

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Data Mining Patterns: New Methods and Applications

By Pascal Poncelet; Florent Masseglia; Maguelonne Teisseire

IGI Global, August 2007

ISBN: 9781599041629

323 pages, $180 US

This book provides an overall view of the solutions for mining, and also explores new kinds of patterns. This book offers theoretical frameworks and presents challenges and their possible solutions concerning pattern extractions, emphasizing both research techniques and real-world applications. This book portrays research applications in data models, techniques and methodologies for mining patterns, multi-relational and multidimensional pattern mining, fuzzy data mining, data streaming, incremental mining, and many other topics.

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Data Mining with Ontologies: Implementations, Findings, and Frameworks

By Hector Oscar Nigro; Sandra Elizabeth Gonzalez Cisaro; Daniel Hugo Xodo

IGI Global, July 2007

ISBN: 9781599046181

311 pages, $180 US

One of the most important and challenging problems in data mining is the definition of prior knowledge either from the process or the domain. Prior knowledge is helpful for selecting suitable data and mining techniques, pruning the space of hypothesis, representing the output in a comprehensible way, and improving the overall method. This book provides a comprehensive set of methodologies and tools for the development of ontological foundations for data mining in diverse domains ranging from biomedicine to marketing. Forming a benchmark reference for future efforts to enhance capabilities in ontology utilization and design, this book is an invaluable addition to libraries worldwide.

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Data Mining with Microsoft SQL Server 2000: Technical Reference

By Claude Seidman

Microsoft Press, May 2001

ISBN: 9780735650916

384 pages, $49.99 US

This book examines the SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services architecture and shows how data mining fits into its complete suite of information-extraction technologies. It also demonstrates how to find nuggets of useful information with SQL Server. It covers what data mining is and isn’t, plus important principles and definitions behind data-mining methodologies, including the role of data-mining models, statistics, and algorithms.

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Chapter 3. Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is the application of data analysis to business data. The titles in this section demonstrate some tools useful for business intelligence, as well as introduce the reader to the subject. These tools cover the back end through the front end.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008-Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-448)

By Erik Veerman; Teo Lachev; Dejan Sarka

Microsoft Press, April 2009

ISBN: 9780735626362

688 pages, $55.99 US

Ace your preparation for the skills measured by MCTS Exam 70-448 and on the job. This official Microsoft study guide is designed to help you make the most of your study time. Maximize your performance on the exam by learning to: Create SSIS packages; troubleshoot data flow and control flow; configure, debug, and deploy SSIS solutions, and more. You can work through hundreds of questions using multiple testing modes to meet your specific learning needs. You get detailed explanations for right and wrong answers including a customized learning path that describes how and where to focus your studies. There are 200 practice and review questions and this comes with a 180-day trial of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition.

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The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset, Second Edition

By Joy Mundy; Warren Thornthwaite; Ralph Kimball

John Wiley & Sons, March 2011

ISBN: 9780470640388

696 pages, $50.00 US

In this new edition, the authors explain how SQL Server 2008 R2 provides a collection of powerful new tools that extend the power of its BI toolset to Excel and SharePoint users. They also show you how to use SQL Server to build a successful data warehouse that supports the business intelligence requirements that are common to most organizations. Covering the complete suite of data warehousing and BI tools that are part of SQL Server 2008 R2, as well as Microsoft Office, the authors walk you through a full project lifecycle, including design, development, deployment and maintenance. This book features more than 50 percent new and revised material that covers the rich new feature set of the SQL Server 2008 R2 release, as well as the Office 2010 release

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Smart Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2008

By Lynn Langit; Kevin S. Goff; Davide Mauri; Sahil Malik; John Welch

Microsoft Press, February 2009

ISBN: 9780735625808

800 pages, $49.99 US

Get the end-to-end instruction you need to design, develop, and deploy more effective data integration, reporting, and analysis solutions using SQL Server 2008. With real-world examples and insights from an expert team, you will master the concepts, tools, and techniques for building solutions that deliver intelligence and business value exactly where users want it. Details covered in this book include: managing the development life cycle and building a BI team, writing queries that rank, sort, and drill down on sales data, and using MDX and DMX Query Designers to build reports based on OLAP cubes and data mining models. The book also covers how to create and implement custom objects using .NET code View reports in Microsoft Office Excel and Office SharePoint Server.

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Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Unleashed

By Steven Mann; Chuck Rivel; Ray Barley; Jim Pletscher; Aneel Ismaily

Sams, May 2011

ISBN: 9780132660099

352 pages, $39.99 US

This is a complete guide to both SharePoint 2010 and BI. This book reflects the unsurpassed real-world experience of five expert consultants at RDA, a Microsoft Gold Partner specializing in delivering advanced BI solutions with SharePoint. The authors offer practical, how-to guidance for every key task involved in building, configuring, and deploying BI solutions within a SharePoint environment, delivering crucial information that can’t be found in any other book. They bridge the gap between SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008, carefully guiding technical professionals on utilizing BI data stored in SQL Server databases. Both a hands-on tutorial and a thorough reference, SharePoint 2010 BI Unleashed will be an indispensable resource for every BI developer, implementer, manager, or integrator working with Microsoft technologies.

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Agile Analytics: A Value-Driven Approach to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

By Ken W. Collier

Addison-Wesley Professional, July 2011

ISBN: 9780321669575

368 pages, $49.99 US

Using Agile methods, you can bring far greater innovation, value, and quality to any data warehouse, business intelligence, or analytics project. However, conventional Agile methodologies must be carefully adapted to address the unique characteristics of DW/BI projects. In this book, Agile pioneer Ken Collier introduces platform-agnostic Agile solutions for integrating infrastructures consisting of diverse operational, legacy, and specialty systems that mix commercial and custom code. Using working examples, he shows how to manage analytics development teams with widely diverse skill sets, and how to support enormous and fast-growing data volumes. Collier brings together proven solutions you can apply right now—whether you’re an IT decision-maker, data warehouse professional, DBA, business intelligence specialist, or database developer. With his help, you can mitigate project risk, improve business alignment, achieve better results, and have fun along the way.

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The Kimball Group Reader: Relentlessly Practical Tools for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

By Ralph Kimball; Margy Ross; Warren Thornthwaite; Joy Mundy; Bob Becker

John Wiley & Sons, February 2010

ISBN: 9780470563106

744 pages, $45 US

Recognized and respected throughout the world as the most influential leaders in the data warehousing industry, Ralph Kimball and the Kimball Group have written articles covering more than 250 topics that define the field of data warehousing. For the first time, the Kimball Group’s incomparable advice, design tips, and best practices have been gathered in this remarkable collection of articles, which spans a decade of data warehousing innovation. Each group of articles is introduced with original commentaries that explain their role in the overall lifecycle methodology developed by the Kimball Group. These practical, hands-on articles are fully updated to reflect current practices and terminology and cover the complete lifecycle—including project planning, requirements gathering, dimensional modeling, ETL, and business intelligence and analytics.

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Knight’s Microsoft Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer: Leveraging Microsoft SQL Server Integration, Analysis, and Reporting Services with Excel and SharePoint

By Brian Knight; Devin Knight; Adam Jorgensen; Patrick LeBlanc; Mike Davis

Wrox, September 2010

ISBN: 9780470889633

432 pages, $44.99 US

If you are just starting to get a handle on Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) tools, this book and accompanying video provides you with the just the right amount of information to perform basic business analysis and reporting. You’ll explore the components and related tools that comprise the Microsoft BI toolset as well as the new BI features of Office 2010. After a basic primer on BI and data modeling, the expert team of authors provides you with step-by-step lessons in the book and videos on the accompanying Video on how to use SQL Server Integration Services, SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Reporting Services, Excel BI (including PowerPivot), and SharePoint.

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Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL

By Roland Bouman, Jos van Dongen

John Wiley & Sons, August 2009

ISBN: 9780470484326

648 pages, $50 US

Open-source Pentaho provides business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing solutions at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions. Now you can take advantage of Pentaho for your business needs with this practical guide written by two major participants in the Pentaho community. The book covers all of the components of the Pentaho BI Suite. You’ll learn to install, use, and maintain Pentaho-and find plenty of background discussion that will bring you thoroughly up to speed on BI and Pentaho concepts.

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IBM Cognos Business Intelligence V10.1 Handbook

By Dean Browne; Brecht Desmeijter; Rodrigo Frealdo Dumont; Armin Kamal; John Leahy; Scott Masson; Ksenija Rusak; Shinsuke Yamamoto; Martin Keen

IBM Redbooks, October 2010

ISBN: 9780738434810

572 pages, $68.75 US

This book helps you to meet strategic objectives using IBM Cognos Business Intelligence V10.1 software. This IBM Redbooks publication aids you in understanding core features of IBM Cognos BI V10.1, while providing examples with practical scenarios.

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Business Intelligence For Dummies

By Swain Scheps

For Dummies, January 2008

ISBN: 9780470127230

384 pages, $24.99 US

So you’ve already figured out that Business Intelligence can be pretty valuable in making the right decisions about your business. But you’ve heard at least a dozen definitions of what it is, and heard of at least that many BI tools. This book makes BI understandable! It takes you step by step through the technologies and the alphabet soup, so you can choose the right technology and implement a successful BI environment. You’ll see how the applications and technologies work together to access, analyze, and present data that you can use to make better decisions about your products, customers and competitors. Whether you’re the business owner or the person charged with developing and implementing a BI strategy, checking out Business Intelligence For Dummies is a good business decision.

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Pro SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Solutions

By Sahil Malik; Srini Sistla; Steve Wright

Apress, December 2010

ISBN: 9781430232858

430 pages, $59.99 US

Business Intelligence (BI) software is everywhere. It is the code and tools that allow you to view different components of a business using a single visual platform, making comprehending mountains of data easier. With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has married one of the most-used team collaboration tools with its business intelligence products, including PerformancePoint Services and Excel Services. Now, users of SharePoint can have a single place to get a view of their business, its organization and processes, and its financial performance. Constructing this type of portal is a process unique to each business. This book takes you through the different tools, services, and frameworks available for building a BI portal atop SharePoint 2010. With comprehensive coverage of Visio Services, PerformancePoint, Excel Services, and a practical look at building scorecards, dashboards, and other reporting solutions, this book answers the fundamental questions about why and how BI can work for your business.

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Silverlight 4 Business Intelligence Software

by Bart Czernicki

Apress, September 2010

ISBN: 9781430230601

575 pages, $59.99 US

Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies such as Microsoft Silverlight can be used to transform traditional user-interfaces filled with boring data into fully interactive analytical applications that quickly deliver insight from large data sets. Furthermore, RIA applications now include 3D spatial-design capabilities that move beyond a simple list or grid and allow for interesting layouts of aggregated data. BI 2.0 implemented via an RIA technology can truly bring out the power of BI and deliver it to an average user on the Web. This book provides developers, designers, and architects with a solid foundation in BI design and architecture concepts for Microsoft Silverlight. It covers key BI design concepts and how they can be applied without an existing BI infrastructure.

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Business Intelligence

By Elizabeth Vitt; Michael Luckevich; Stacia Misner

Microsoft Press, December 2008

ISBN: 9780735626607

220 pages, $24.99 US

This book helps you understand what business intelligence is, how it works, where it’s used, and why and when to use it. This insightful book illustrates how organizations can make better, faster decisions about their customers, partners, and operations by turning mountains of data into valuable business information that’s always at the fingertips of decision makers. You’ll learn what’s involved in using business intelligence to bring together information, people, and technology to create successful business strategies, and how to execute those strategies with confidence.

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PowerPivot for Business Intelligence Using Excel and SharePoint

By Barry Ralston

Apress, March 2011

ISBN: 9781430233800

304 pages, $39.99 US

PowerPivot comprises a set of technologies for easy access to data mining and business intelligence analysis from Microsoft Excel and SharePoint. Power users and developers alike can create sophisticated, online analytic processing (OLAP) solutions using PowerPivot for Excel, and then share those solutions with other users via PowerPivot for SharePoint. Data can be pulled in from any of the leading database platforms, as well as from spreadsheets and flat files. This book is your key to mastering PowerPivot. The book takes a scenario-based approach to show you how to collect data, to mine that data through insightful analysis, and to draw conclusions that drive business performance. Each chapter in the book is focused on a specific challenge that you’ll encounter when using PowerPivot.

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Oracle Business Intelligence: Create Reports & Interactive Dashboards

By Sideris Courseware Corp.

Sideris Courseware Corp., November 2009

ISBN: 01320110029SI

480 pages, $120 US

Oracle Business Intelligence (BI), formerly known as Siebel Business Analytics, empowers business users with sophisticated data analytic capabilities without any knowledge of database structures or the SQL database language. This training course will guide students through all of the features available from the product to allow you to build sophisticated database requests and to format resulting answers.

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Business Intelligence Roadmap: The Complete Project Lifecycle for Decision-Support Applications

By Larissa T. Moss; Shaku Atre

Addison-Wesley Professional, February 2003

ISBN: 9780201784206

576 pages, $64.99 US

This book is a visual guide to developing an effective business intelligence (BI) decision-support application. This book outlines a methodology that takes into account the complexity of developing applications in an integrated BI environment. You are walked through every step of the process—from strategic planning to the selection of new technologies and the evaluation of application releases. The book also serves as a single-source guide to the best practices of BI projects. The authors crystallize their many years of experience in a list of dos, don’ts, tips, and rules of thumb. Both the book and the methodology it describes are designed to adapt to the specific needs of individual stakeholders and organizations. It is a clear and comprehensive guide to negotiating the complexities inherent in the development of valuable business intelligence decision-support applications.

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Oracle Business Intelligence: The Condensed Guide to Analysis and Reporting

By Yuli Vasilev

Packt Publishing, October 2010

ISBN: 9781849681186

184 pages, $35.99 US

With this book you can quickly learn how to put the power of the Oracle Business Intelligence solution to work for you. The examples in this introductory guide will make you immediately familiar with tools included in the Oracle Business Intelligence package. This book will teach you how to find answers to common business questions and make informed business decisions, and it will help you use the Oracle Business Intelligence SE platform and prepare a database for analysis. You will also learn how to build, deploy and execute reports using Oracle Reports, and integrate data from different data sources with warehousing, employing Oracle Warehouse Builder software. Covering advanced Oracle Business Intelligence features, this book will teach you how to pivot data, drill it up and down, as well as display it visually in graphs.

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The New Era of Enterprise Business Intelligence: Using Analytics to Achieve a Global Competitive Advantage

By Mike Biere

IBM Press, August 2010

ISBN: 9780132100588

320 pages, $44.99 US

In this book, top BI expert Mike Biere presents a complete blueprint for creating winning BI strategies and infrastructure, systematically maximizing the value of information throughout the enterprise. This product-independent guide brings together start-to-finish guidance and practical checklists for every senior IT executive, planner, strategist, implementer, and the actual business users themselves. Drawing on thousands of hours working with enterprise customers, Biere helps decision-makers choose from today’s unprecedented spectrum of options, including the latest BI platform suites and appliances. He offers practical, “in-the-trenches” insights on a wide spectrum of planning and implementation issues, from segmenting and supporting users to working with unstructured data.

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Chapter 4. Mathematical Toolkits: R, Matlab, Mathematica

A number of mathematical software packages are introduced in this section. These tools kits allow for rapid prototyping of advanced data analysis methods.

R in a Nutshell

By Joseph Adler

O’Reilly Media, January 2010

ISBN: 9780596801700

640 pages, $49.99 US

R is one of the best tools available for data visualization and statistical computing, and this book is simply the best way to learn this open source language and environment. Practical and easy to read, it demonstrates why R is increasingly popular for analyzing moderate-to-large data sets. Most books available on R are stiff and academic, but this book offers a readable overview of the language, and contains a reference for the most commonly used features.You will learn the basics of the R language, analyze statistics in R, and take advantage of R’s graphical capabilities. With the helpf of this book, scientists, researchers, and students can perform complicated statistical analysis in minutes that would take hours with Excel.

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R Cookbook

By Paul Teetor

O’Reilly Media, March 2011

ISBN: 9780596809157

436 pages, $39.99 US

R is a powerful and popular tool for statistics, graphics, and statistical programming.It is a free, open source system whose implementation is the collective accomplishment of many intelligent, hard-working people. But R can be frustrating. It’s not obvious how to accomplish many tasks, even simple ones. This book is full of how-to recipes that solve specific problems. It starts with basic tasks before moving on to input and output, general statistics, graphics, and linear regression. If you are a beginner, this book will get you started faster. If you are an intermediate user, this book is useful for expanding your horizons and jogging your memory. This book will help you be productive with R immediately.

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MATLAB: A Practical Introduction to Programming and Problem Solving

By Stormy Attaway

Butterworth-Heinemann, February 2009

ISBN: 9780750687621

471 pages, $44.95 US

Assuming no knowledge of programming, this book presents both programming concepts and MATLAB’s built-in functions, providing a perfect platform for exploiting MATLAB’s extensive capabilities for tackling engineering problems. It starts with programming concepts such as variables, assignments, input/output, and selection statements, moves onto loops and then solves problems using both the programming concept and the power of MATLAB side-by-side. In-depth coverage is given to input/output, a topic that is fundamental to many engineering applications.

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Mathematica Navigator: Mathematics, Statistics, and Graphics, Third Edition

By Heikki Ruskeepaa

Academic Press, March 2009

ISBN: 9780123741646

1132 pages, $69.95 US

This book is a general introduction to the most recent versions of Mathematica, the symbolic computation software from Wolfram. The book emphasizes graphics, methods of applied mathematics and statistics, and programming. This book can be used both as a tutorial and as a handbook. While no previous experience with Mathematica is required, most chapters also include advanced material, so that the book will be a valuable resource for both beginners and experienced users.

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Essential MATLAB for Engineers and Scientists Fourth Edition

By Brian Hahn; Dan Valentine

Academic Press, October 2009

ISBN: 9780123748836

407 pages, $49.95 US

This book presents MATLAB both as a mathematical tool and as a programming language, giving a concise and easy to master introduction to its potential and power. The fundamentals of MATLAB are illustrated throughout with many examples from a wide range of familiar scientific and engineering areas, as well as from everyday life. The new edition has been updated to include coverage of Symbolic Math and SIMULINK. It also adds new examples and applications, and uses the most recent release of Matlab.

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Mathematica Cookbook

By Sal Mangano

O’Reilly Media, May 2010

ISBN: 9780596520991

832 pages, $64.99 US

This book helps you master Mathematica’s core principles by walking you through real-world problems. Ideal for browsing, this book includes recipes for working with numerics, data structures, algebraic equations, calculus, and statistics. You’ll also venture into exotic territory with recipes for data visualization using 2D and 3D graphic tools, image processing, and music. Although Mathematica 7 is a highly advanced computational platform, the recipes in this book make it accessible to everyone—whether you’re working on high school algebra, simple graphs, PhD-level computation, financial analysis, or advanced engineering models.

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Statistical Analysis with R

By John M. Quick

Packt Publishing, October 2010

ISBN: 9781849512084

300 pages, $40.49 US

Without any prior experience in programming or statistical software, this book will help you quickly become a knowledgeable user of R. This book will take you on a journey as the strategist for an ancient Chinese kingdom. Along the way, you will learn how to use R to arrive at practical solutions and how to effectively communicate your results. Ultimately, the fate of the kingdom depends upon your ability to make informed, data-driven decisions with R.

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Chapter 5. Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

This section covers more advanced methods of data analysis including extracting useful data from unstructured human language. Tools in this section further show how to use these advance methods on big data.

Hilary Mason: An Introduction to Machine Learning with Web Data

By Hilary Mason

O’Reilly Media, May 2011

ISBN: 9781449309510

2 hours 43 minutes, $29.99 US

Once you’ve accumulated a pile of data through your web application, what do you do with it? This insightful video course shows you how to solve data analysis problems using basic machine learning techniques and frameworks. You’ll follow several examples through the entire process—from obtaining, cleaning, and exploring data to building a model and interpreting the results.

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Handbook of Research on Machine Learning Applications and Trends

By Emilio Soria Olivas; José David Martín Guerrero; Marcelino Martinez-Sober; Jose Rafael Magdalena-Benedito

IGI Global, August 2009

ISBN: 9781605667669

735 pages, $495.00 US

The machine learning approach provides a useful tool when the amount of data is very large and a model is not available to explain the generation and relation of the data set. This book provides practical applications for solving problems and applying various techniques in automatic data extraction and setting. It fills the gap between theory and practice, providing a strong reference for academicians, researchers, and practitioners.

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Real World Applications Panel: Machine Learning and Decision Support

By Jonathan Seidman; Robert Lancaster; Alasdair Allan; Alon Halevy

O’Reilly Media, March 2011

ISBN: 9781449306014

41 minutes, $9.99 US

Can machines help us make better decisions? In this video, real-world practitioners from the travel, finance, and the energy industry give us an inside look at how they’re applying machine learning to their industries, optimizing the use of resources and helping with decision support.

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Scaling Data Analysis with Apache Mahout

By Isabel Drost

O’Reilly Media, March 2011

ISBN: 9781449306137

38 minutes, $9.99 US

With growing amounts of digital data at the fingertips of software developers, the need for a scalable, easy to use framework is tremendous. This video introduces Apache Mahout—a project with the goal of implementing scalable machine learning algorithms for the masses.

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Natural Language Processing with Python

By Steven Bird; Ewan Klein; Edward Loper

O’Reilly Media, June 2009

ISBN: 9780596803346

512 pages, $44.99 US

This book offers an introduction to natural language processing, the field that supports a variety of language technologies, from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation. With it, you’ll learn how to write Python programs that work with large collections of unstructured text. You’ll access richly annotated datasets using a comprehensive range of linguistic data structures, and you’ll understand the main algorithms for analyzing the content and structure of written communication. This book will help you gain practical skills in natural language processing using the Python programming language and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) open source library. If you’re interested in developing web applications, analyzing multilingual news sources, or documenting endangered languages—or if you’re simply curious to have a programmer’s perspective on how human language works—you’ll find this book both fascinating and immensely useful.

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Online Sentiment, Machine Learning, and Prediction

By Ben Gimpert; Josh Merchant; Ryan Strynatka; Margaret Francis

O’Reilly Media, March 2011

ISBN: 9781449306205

34 minutes, $9.99

Today’s web analyst has moved far beyond funnels and visitors. Automated systems decide who gets what content, and language parsing tries to distill sentiment from millions of online interactions. This video looks at where web analytics is headed, and how new algorithms and approaches are yielding fresh insights into online commerce.

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Chapter 6. Analytics

Analytics is the collection and analysis of data that is used to help in decision making. Explore the big data books in this section to get a grasp on making smart business decisions.

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

By Avinash Kaushik

Sybex, October 2009

ISBN: 9780470529393

503 pages, $39.99 US

Web Analytics 2.0 presents a new framework that will permanently change how you think about analytics. It provides specific recommendations for creating an actionable strategy, applying analytical techniques correctly, solving challenges such as measuring social media and multichannel campaigns, achieving optimal success by leveraging experimentation, and employing tactics for truly listening to your customers. The book will help your organization become more data driven while you become a super analysis ninja!

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Google Analytics

By Justin Cutroni

O’Reilly Media, September 2010

ISBN: 9781449394608

224 pages, $29.99 US

Take advantage of Google Analytics’ powerful and free tools to understand exactly how users behave when they visit your website or use your web application. This book shows you how to probe general traffic, marketing, and ecommerce information with these tools, and teaches you how to supplement them with add-ons and external tools when you want to dig even deeper. You’ll also learn how to create custom reports to analyze specific issues. Remember, Google Analytics analyzes business data, which means each business will configure it differently. You need to understand what’s important for your business, and this book will help you.

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Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics, Second Edition

By Brian Clifton

Sybex, March 2010

ISBN: 9780470562314

527 pages, $39.99 US

Packed with insider tips and tricks, this how-to guide is fully revised to cover the latest version of Google Analytics and shows you how to implement proven Web analytics methods and concepts. It is the perfect book for marketers, vendors, consultants, and Webmasters who want to learn the installation, configuration, tracking techniques, and best practices of Google Analytics. This book is a detailed usage guide written by one of the software’s original creators, and is valuable for both novice and experienced users of Google Analytics.

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Sams Teach Yourself Google Analytics in 10 Minutes

By Michael Miller

Sams, July 2010

ISBN: 9780132120807

240 pages, $14.99 US

This book provides you with straightforward, practical answers when you need fast results. By working through its 10-minute lessons, you’ll learn everything you need to use Google Analytics to accurately measure your website’s performance–and improve it! This includes learning how to track visitors from search engines, pay-per-click advertising, and email. It will also help you identify your best and worst content, fix poorly performing pages, and improve your site by tracking error pages and broken links. You’ll even learn how to choose the right reports and data, understand them, and act on what you learn.

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Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations with Your Customers

By Louis Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld Media, July 2011

ISBN: 9781457102523

224 pages, $22 US

This book shows you how to use search analytics to listen to and understand your customers’ needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs. If you’re new to this topic read the first two chapters, but if you are ready to jump right in, the second section is full of tools and approaches to help you get the most out of analyzing your query data. The book moves on to help you gain new insights from your data and use the data to measure how well your site is performing against the goals you’ve already determined for it. You will also learn ways to improve your search system’s performance, as well as your site’s navigation, metadata, and content. You can start trying—and benefiting from—many of these tips right away.

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Business Intelligence: Making Decisions Through Data Analytics

By Jerzy Surma

Business Expert Press, March 2011

ISBN: 9781606491850

150 pages, $27 US

Focusing on practical business issues, this text demonstrates how to apply data warehousing and data analytics to support business decision making. This book progresses through a logical sequence, starting with data model infrastructure, then data preparation, followed by data analysis, integration, knowledge discovery, and finally the actual use of discovered knowledge. All of the examples are based upon the most recent achievements in business intelligence. This book covers a methodology that takes into account the complexity of developing applications in an integrated business intelligence environment, and is written for managers, business consultants, and students in business administration.

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The New Era of Enterprise Business Intelligence: Using Analytics to Achieve a Global Competitive Advantage

By Mike Biere

IBM Press, August 2010

ISBN: 9780132100588

320 pages, $44.99 US

The typical enterprise recognizes the immense potential of business intelligence (BI) and its impact upon many facets within the organization, but it’s not easy to transform BI’s potential into real business value. In this book, top BI expert Mike Biere presents a complete blueprint for creating winning BI strategies to help maximize the value of information throughout the enterprise. This product-independent guide brings together start-to-finish guidance and practical checklists for every senior IT executive, planner, strategist, implementer, and the actual business users themselves. Drawing on thousands of hours working with enterprise customers, Biere helps decision-makers choose from today’s unprecedented spectrum of options, including the latest BI platform suites and appliances. He offers practical, “in-the-trenches” insights on a wide spectrum of planning and implementation issues, from segmenting and supporting users to working with unstructured data.

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Performance Marketing with Google Analytics: Practical Strategies for Maximizing Online ROI

By Sebastian Tonkin; Caleb Whitmore; Justin Cutroni

John Wiley & Sons, April 2010

ISBN: 9780470578315

504 pages, $39.99 US

An unparalleled author trio shares valuable advice for using Google Analytics to achieve your business goals in this book. Google Analytics is a free tool used by millions of Web site owners across the globe to track how visitors interact with their Web sites, where they arrive from, and which visitors drive the most revenue and sales leads. This book offers clear explanations of practical applications drawn from the real world. It features in-depth examples and case studies on how to increase revenue from search advertising, how to optimize an existing website, and how to prioritize channels and campaigns. This book demonstrates how you can best use Google Analytics to achieve your business objectives.

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Google Analytics Third Edition

By Jerri L. Ledford; Joe Teixeira; Mary E. Tyler

John Wiley & Sons, December 2009

ISBN: 9780470531280

432 pages, $34.99 US

With great new features including advanced customization and segmentation capabilities, Google Analytics supplies information about your site visitors that helps you ramp up the value of your site. Like its two previous editions, this guide shows you what’s new in Google Analytics, how to get the most from the program, and what to do with what you learn. It explores new features such as AdSense integration, cost data settings, motion charts, custom reports, and event tracking, drilling down with advanced techniques, tips, and hacks.

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Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

By Avinash Kaushik

Sybex, June 2007

ISBN: 9780470130650

480 pages, $29.99 US

Written by an in-the-trenches practitioner, this step-by-step guide shows you how to implement a successful Web analytics strategy. Web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik, in his thought-provoking style, debunks leading myths and leads you on a path to gaining actionable insights from your analytics efforts. Discover how to move beyond clickstream analysis, why qualitative data should be your focus, and more insights and techniques that will help you develop a customer-centric mindset without sacrificing your company’s bottom line.

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Tapping into Unstructured Data: Integrating Unstructured Data and Textual Analytics into Business Intelligence

By William H. Inmon; Anthony Nesavich

Prentice Hall, December 2007

ISBN: 9780137136889

264 pages, $49.99 US

A wealth of invaluable information exists in unstructured textual form, but organizations have found it difficult or impossible to access and utilize it. This is changing rapidly: new approaches finally make it possible to glean useful knowledge from virtually any collection of unstructured data. William H. Inmon—the father of data warehousing—and Anthony Nesavich introduce the next data revolution: unstructured data management. This book covers all you need to know to make unstructured data work for your organization. You’ll learn how to bring it into your existing structured data environment, leverage existing analytical infrastructure, and implement textual analytic processing technologies to solve new problems and uncover new opportunities. The book also covers new ways to integrate textual data into data warehouses, and new SQL techniques for reading and analyzing text. This book will be indispensable to every business and technical professional trying to make sense of a large body of unstructured text.

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Pro SQL Server 2008 Analytics: Delivering Sales and Marketing Dashboards

By Brian Paulen; Jeff Finken

Apress, March 2009

ISBN: 9781430219286

300 pages, $49.99 US

This book provides everything you need to know to develop sophisticated and visually appealing sales and marketing dashboards using SQL Server 2008. It also covers how to integrate those dashboards with SharePoint, PerformancePoint, and other key Microsoft technologies. For analysts and executives, this book will provide the planning, requirement-gathering, and project management tools necessary to ensure your implementation goes smoothly. For developers, this book will enable you to further understand the tools available from Microsoft and how they can most successfully be implemented in your organization by beginning with basic steps and progressing to more advanced concepts. It is full of sensible concepts and direction for a successful analytics deployment based on the authors’ real-world analytics and CRM projects and experiences.

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Progressive Methods in Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence: Concepts and Competitive Analytics

By David Tanier

IGI Global, February 2009

ISBN: 9781605662329

390 pages, $195 US

This book covers the latest trends, studies, and developments in business intelligence and data warehousing. Consisting of four main sections, this book covers crucial topics within the field such as OLAP, spatio-temporal data warehousing, and benchmarking of the subject. Overall, this volume covers important foundations for researches and applications in data warehousing, covering modeling, OLAP and patterns, as well as new directions in benchmarking and evaluating data warehousing.

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Business Analytics for Managers: Taking Business Intelligence beyond Reporting

By Gert H.N. Laursen; Jesper Thorlund

John Wiley & Sons, July 2010

ISBN: 9780470890615

272 pages, $49.95 US

Filled with examples and forward-thinking guidance from renowned BA leaders Gert Laursen and Jesper Thorlund, this book offers powerful techniques for making increasingly advanced use of information in order to survive any market conditions. Uncover tips for supporting your company’s ability to innovate in the future by using analytics and learn how to use information as a strategic asset. This book will help you improve your business’s decision making, align your business processes with your business’s objectives and drive your company into a prosperous future. This book will help you add tremendous value to your business.

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Your Google Game Plan for Success: Increasing Your Web Presence with Google AdWords, Analytics, and Website Optimizer

By Joe Teixeira

John Wiley & Sons, Septembr 2010

ISBN: 9780470641644

456 pages, $29.99 US

Savvy marketers are always searching for new ways to attract and keep online customers. Google’s array of online tools plus the techniques and tips in this expert guide help you unlock the mystery of doing business in the digital age. Learn the basics of Google AdWords, Analytics, and Website Optimizer—and then discover how to use this powerful trifecta together to help you track, extract, and analyze data and make necessary changes. This book shows you how to use each of these tools individually, and then together as a powerful trio to track, analyze, and optimize your Web presence. You will learn how to install tracking code in your Web site, what reports are available and how to use them, testing, applying what you learn, and much more. Start increasing ROI, online sales, and web site traffic quality with Google tools and the insights and techniques in this expert guide.

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Deriving Intelligence from Large Data Using Hadoop and Applying Analytics

By Vineet Tyagi

O’Reilly Media, March 2011

ISBN: 9781449306267

37 minutes, $9.99 US

Organizations today possess massive data - in tera- and petabytes - that needs to be effectively collected, stored and processed. Hadoop is a cost effective option that helps manage this big data. To derive real returns from these big data systems, one needs to extract useful insights and business intelligence, and this video will help you get started.

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Realtime Analytics at Twitter

By Kevin Well

O’Reilly Media, March 2011

ISBN: 9781449306199

42 minutes, $9.99 US

Most analytics systems rely on large offline computations, which means results take hours or days. Twitter is all about realtime, but with over 160 million users producing over 90 million tweets per day, we need realtime analytics that scale horizontally. This video discusses the development of that infrastructure, as well as the products we are beginning to build on top of it.

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Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data To Make Smart Business Decisions

By Jason Burby; Shane Atchison; Jim Sterne

Sybex, May 2007

ISBN: 9780470124741

288 pages, $29.99 US

Knowing everything you can about each click to your Web site can help you make strategic decisions regarding your business. This book is about the why, not just the how, of web analytics and the rules for developing a “culture of analysis” inside your organization. It answers why you should collect various types of data, why you need a strategy, why it must remain flexible and why your data must generate meaningful action. The authors use their decade of experience in Web analytics to answer all of these questions.

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WordPress for Business Bloggers: Promote and grow your WordPress blog with advanced plugins, analytics, advertising, and SEO

By Paul Thewlis

Packt Publishing, August 2008

ISBN: 9781847195326

356 pages, $35.99 US

This book will take you beyond the basics of WordPress, helping you take full advantage of its rich and powerful features to transform your basic blog into a more advanced and professional blog as quickly and painlessly as possible. You will learn everything you need to know to extend and grow your business blog. You will learn to mange the content including images and videos, which will make your blog more appealing. You’ll also learn how to market and measure the success of your blog using Google web applications and other popular tools. So, if want to transform your business blog to give a kick start to your business this book is for you.

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IBM Smart Analytics System

By Whei-Jen Chen; Rafael Aielo; Silvio Luiz Correia Ferrari; Zohar Nissare-Houssen

IBM Redbooks, February 2011

ISBN: 9780738435176

342 pages, $50.00 US

The IBM Smart Analytics System is a fully-integrated and scalable data warehouse solution that combines software, server, and storage resources to offer optimal business intelligence and information management performance for enterprises. This IBM Redbook introduces the architecture and components of the IBM Smart Analytics System family, including its installation and configuration and show how to manage the systems effectively to deliver an enterprise class service. This book is targeted at the architects and specialists who need to know the concepts and the detailed instructions for a successful Smart Analytics System implementation and operation.

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Chapter 7. Statistics

A major component in data analysis is statistics. This section introduces the reader to statictics in a gentle fashion.

Head First Statistics

By Dawn Griffith

O’Reilly Media, August 2008

ISBN: 9780596527587

720 pages, $34.99 US

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a statistics book that made histograms, probability distributions, and chi square analysis more enjoyable than going to the dentist? Head First Statistics brings this typically dry subject to life, teaching you everything you want and need to know about statistics through engaging, interactive, and thought-provoking material, full of puzzles, stories, quizzes, visual aids, and real-world examples. Whether you’re a student, a professional, or just curious about statistical analysis, Head First’s brain-friendly formula helps you get a firm grasp of statistics so you can understand key points and actually use them. Learn to present data visually with charts and plots; discover the difference between taking the average with mean, median, and mode, and why it’s important; learn how to calculate probability and expectation; and much more. Head First Statistics is ideal for high school and college students taking statistics and satisfies the requirements for passing the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) Statistics Exam.

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Statistics in a Nutshell

By Sarah Boslaugh; Dr. Paul Andrew Watters

O’Reilly Media, July 2008

ISBN: 9780596510497

478 pages, $34.99

Need to learn statistics as part of your job, or want some help passing a statistics course? Statistics in a Nutshell is a clear and concise introduction and reference that’s perfect for anyone with no previous background in the subject. This book gives you a solid understanding of statistics without being too simple, yet without the numbing complexity of most college texts. You get a firm grasp of the fundamentals and a hands-on understanding of how to apply them before moving on to the more advanced material that follows. Each chapter presents you with easy-to-follow descriptions illustrated by graphics, formulas, and plenty of solved examples. Before you know it, you’ll learn to apply statistical reasoning and statistical techniques, from basic concepts of probability and hypothesis testing to multivariate analysis.

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Probability and Statistics for Finance

By Svetlozar T. Rachev; Markus Höechstöetter; Frank J. Fabozzi CFA; Sergio M. Focardi

John Wiley & Sons, September 2007

ISBN: 9780470400937

672 pages, $95 US

This book provides a comprehensive look at how probability and statistics is applied to the investment process. This book shows you how to apply quantitative methods to portfolios, in a clear, concise manner. Informative and accessible, this guide starts off with the basics and builds to an intermediate level of mastery. The authors cover a wide range of topics in this book, which can be used by all finance professionals as well as students aspiring to enter the field of finance.

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The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Statistics, 2nd edition

By Robert Donnelly Jr.

Alpha Books, May 2007

ISBN: 9781592576340

416 pages, $19.95 US

Aimed at high school and college students who need to take statistics to fulfill a degree requirement, this book follows a standard statistics curriculum with topics that include frequency distributions, probability, binomial distribution, poisson distribution, normal distribution, hypothesis testing, simple regression analysis, and more. Readers will find information on frequency distributions; mean, median, and mode; range, variance, and standard deviation; probability; and more.

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The Manga Guide to Statistics

By Shin Takahashi

No Starch Press, October 2008

ISBN: 9781593271893

224 pages, $19.95 US

This book will teach you everything you need to know about statistics, while entertaining you at the same time. With its unique combination of Japanese-style comics called manga and serious educational content, the EduManga format is already a hit in Japan. Reluctant statistics students of all ages will enjoy learning along with Rui, the main character, in this charming, easy-to-read guide, which uses real-world examples like teen magazine quizzes, bowling games, test scores, and ramen noodle prices. Examples, exercises, and answer keys help you follow along and check your work. An appendix showing how to perform statistics calculations in Microsoft Excel makes it easy to put Rui’s lessons into practice. This EduManga book is a translation from a bestselling series in Japan, co-published with Ohmsha, Ltd. of Tokyo, Japan.

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Elementary Statistics Using SAS

By SAS Publishing

SAS Publishing, October 2009

ISBN: 9781607643791

560 pages, $59.95 US

Bridging the gap between statistics texts and SAS documentation, this book is written for those who want to perform analyses to solve problems. The book explains the basics of SAS data sets and shows how to use SAS for descriptive statistics and graphs. It also covers fundamental statistical concepts, including normality and hypothesis testing. It even shows analyses for comparing two groups, comparing multiple groups, fitting regression equations, and exploring contingency tables. For each analysis, the author explains the assumptions, statistical approach, and SAS methods and syntax, and makes conclusions from the results. Statistical methods covered include two-sample t-tests, paired-difference t-tests, analysis of variance, multiple comparison techniques, regression, regression diagnostics, and chi-square tests.

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Even You Can Learn Statistics: A Guide for Everyone Who Has Ever Been Afraid of Statistics, Second Edition

By David M. Levine Ph.D.; David F. Stephan

FT Press, August 2009

ISBN: 9780137025961

384 pages, $19.99 US

This fully updated book teaches you all the statistical techniques you’ll need for finance, quality, marketing, the social sciences, or anything else! Simple jargon-free explanations help you understand every technique. Practical examples and worked-out problems give you hands-on practice. This edition delivers new examples, more detailed problems and sample solutions, plus an all-new chapter on powerful multiple regression techniques.

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Statistics Hacks

By Bruce Frey

O’Reilly Media, May 2006

ISBN: 9780596101640

360 pages, $29.99 US

These cool tips, tricks, and mind-boggling solutions from the world of statistics, measurement, and research methods will not only amaze and entertain you, but will give you an advantage in several real-world situations-including business. This book is ideal for anyone who likes puzzles, brainteasers, games, gambling, magic tricks, and those who want to apply math and science to everyday circumstances. Statistics Hacks presents useful techniques from statistics, educational and psychological measurement, and experimental research to help you solve a variety of problems in business, games, and life. Whether you’re a statistics enthusiast who does calculations in your sleep or a civilian who is entertained by clever solutions to interesting problems, Statistics Hacks has tools to give you an edge over the world’s slim odds.

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Statistical Analysis: Microsoft Excel 2010

By Conrad Carlbert

Que, April 2011

ISBN: 9780132681872

464 pages, $39.99 US

Use Excel 2010’s powerful statistical tools to gain a deeper understanding of your data, make more accurate and reliable inferences, and solve problems in fields ranging from business to health sciences with this book. Top Excel guru Conrad Carlberg shows how to use Excel 2010 to perform the core statistical tasks every business professional, student, and researcher should master. Using real-world examples, Carlberg helps you choose the right technique for each problem and get the most out of Excel’s statistical features, including its new consistency functions. Along the way, you discover the most effective ways to use correlation and regression and analysis of variance and covariance. You see how to use Excel to test statistical hypotheses using the normal, binomial, t and F distributions.

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Statistical Analysis with R

By John M. Quick

Packt Publishing, October 2010

ISBN: 9781849512084

300 pages, $40.49 US

Without any prior experience in programming or statistical software, this book will help you quickly become a knowledgeable user of R. This book will take you on a journey as the strategist for an ancient Chinese kingdom. Along the way, you will learn how to use R to arrive at practical solutions and how to effectively communicate your results. Ultimately, the fate of the kingdom depends upon your ability to make informed, data-driven decisions with R.

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Common Statistical Methods for Clinical Research with SAS Examples, Third Edition

By Glenn Walker; Jack Shostak

SAS Publishing, February 2010

ISBN: 9781607642282

552 pages, $79.95 US

This Third Edition is a thoroughly updated edition of the popular introductory statistics book for clinical researchers. This new edition has been extensively updated to include the use of ODS graphics in numerous examples as well as a new emphasis on PROC MIXED. Straightforward and easy to use as either a text or a reference, the book is full of practical examples from clinical research to illustrate both statistical and SAS methodology. Each example is worked out completely, step by step, from the raw data. This book is an applications book with minimal theory that drills down into details that will be valuable to statistical analysts and programmers. Further details, as well as bonus information and a guide to further reading, are presented in the extensive appendices. This text is a one-source guide for statisticians that documents the use of the tests used most often in clinical research, with assumptions, details, and some tricks—all in one place.

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Think Stats

By Allen Downey

O’Reilly Media, July 2011

ISBN: 9781449307110

140 pages, $29.99 US

This is a textbook for a new kind of introductory prob-stat class. It emphasizes the use of statistics to explore large datasets. It takes a computation approach, allowing students to run experiments to test statistical behavior, run simulations, and use discrete distributions and computations. Because students work in a general-purpose programming language (Python), they are able to import data from almost any source, since they aren’t limited to data that has been cleaned and formatted for a particular statistics tool. The book lends itself to a project-based approach, where sutdents must pose a statistical question, find a dataset that can address it, and apply each of the techniques they learn to their own data. To demonstrate the kind of analysis for students, the book presents a case study that runs through all of the chapters.

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Chapter 8. Cloud Services & Infrastructure

Cloud Computing Bible

By Barrie Sosinsky

John Wiley & Sons, January 2011

ISBN: 9780470903568

525 pages, $44.99 US

Because cloud computing involves various technologies, protocols, platforms, and infrastructure elements, this comprehensive reference is just what you need if you’ll be using or implementing cloud computing. Cloud computing offers significant cost savings by eliminating upfront expenses for hardware and software. Anyone involved with planning, implementing, using, or maintaining a cloud computing project will rely on the information found in this book.

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Cloud Computing For Dummies

By Judith Hurwitz; Robin Bloor; Marcia Kaufman; Fern Halper

For Dummies, November 2009

ISBN: 9780470484708

336 pages, $29.99 US

Cloud computing can be difficult to understand at first, but the cost-saving possibilities are great and many companies are getting on board. If you’ve been put in charge of implementing a cloud computing solution, this straightforward, plain-English guide clears up the confusion and helps you get your plan in place. You’ll learn how cloud computing enables you to run a more green IT infrastructure, and access technology-enabled services from the Internet (“in the cloud”) without having to understand, manage, or invest in the technology infrastructure that supports them. You’ll also find out what you need to consider when implementing a plan, how to handle security issues, and more.

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Cloud Application Architectures

By George Reese

O’Reilly Media, April 2009

ISBN: 9780596157647

208 pages, $29.99 US

If you’re involved in planning IT infrastructure as a network or system architect, system administrator, or developer, this book will help you adapt your skills to work with these highly scalable, highly redundant infrastructure services. While analysts hotly debate the advantages and risks of cloud computing, IT staff and programmers are left to determine whether and how to put their applications into these virtualized services. This book provides answers—and critical guidance—on issues of cost, availability, performance, scaling, privacy, and security. To provide realistic examples of the book’s principles in action, the author delves into some of the choices and operations available on Amazon Web Services, and includes high-level summaries of several of the other services available on the market today. This book provides best practices that apply to every available cloud service. Learn how to make the transition to the cloud and prepare your web applications to succeed.

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Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef

By Stephen Nelson-Smith

O’Reilly Media, June 2011

ISBN: 9781449309718

88 pages, $24.99 US

The advent of modern programming frameworks such as Rails and Django, together with the ready availability of virtualization, and the explosion of interest in configuration management tools such as Puppet and Chef has revolutionized the web operations world. In this book, the author makes a case for introducing acceptance test driven infrastructure development as a way to deliver value and reduce risk. Developing infrastructure with Opscode Chef, and testing it using Cucumber, he explains how to build a test environment that allows end-to-end testing of the whole infrastructure to tease out dependencies and hidden side effects.

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Host Your Web Site In The Cloud: Amazon Web Services Made Easy, 1Ed

By Jeffrey Barr

SitePoint, September 2010

ISBN: 9780980576832

300 pages, $39.95 US

This book is a step-by-step guide to hosting web sites on Amazon EC2. Authored by Jeffrey Barr, it covers all aspects of cloud hosting and migrating your existing applications and websites to the Cloud. This book is aimed at web developers who have built a web application or two, and are ready to leap into the world of cloud computing using Amazon Web Services. This book makes use of the PHP language, and it is assumed that you know the fundamentals of HTML and CSS, and that you’re comfortable with the Linux command line. By the end of this book, you can expect to have a firm grasp of the concept of cloud computing and its role in enabling a whole new class of scalable and reliable web applications. You’ll also have gained a clear understanding of the range of Amazon Web Services, such as the Simple Storage Service, the Elastic Compute Cloud, the Simple Queue Service, and SimpleDB. You’ll be able to make use of all these services in your web applications as you write commands, tools, and processes in PHP.

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Securing the Cloud: Cloud Computer Security Techniques and Tactics

By Vic J.R. Winkler

Syngress, April 2011

ISBN: 9781597495929

315 pages, $59.95 US

This book is a practical resource for anyone who is considering using, building, or securing a cloud implementation. Cloud infrastructure engineers, cloud services engineers, and integrators will find value in learning about relevant security approaches and cloud security architecture. It will also provide value to those who are interested in understanding cloud security. Executive-level management will gain an understanding of the security advantages and developing trends that are likely to mature as cloud computing progresses.

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Automated Infrastructure is on the Menu with Chef

By Joshua Timberman; Aaron Peterson

O’Reilly Media, July 2010

ISBN: 9781449396497

2 hours 3 minutes, $79.99 US

As application infrastructures become increasingly complex, the need for a cohesive, integrated deployment and configuration solution becomes apparent. The era of 6 week server deployments is gone in a world where new computing resources are an API call away. Modern infrastructures need an API, so systems can be automated easier. Chef provides abstraction and an API so system administrators write simple code that describes the roles, recipes and resources that should be applied to systems. Chef is an open source system integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to an entire infrastructure, and this book will help you learn everything you need to know when using Chef.

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Cloud Security and Privacy

By Tim Mather; Subra Kumaraswamy; Shahed Latif

O’Reilly Media, September 2009

ISBN: 9780596806453

336 pages, $34.99 US

You may regard cloud computing as an ideal way for your company to control IT costs, but do you know how private and secure this service really is? Not many people do. With this book, you’ll learn what’s at stake when you trust your data to the cloud, and what you can do to keep your virtual infrastructure and web applications secure. Ideal for IT staffers, information security and privacy practitioners, business managers, service providers, and investors alike, this book offers you sound advice from three well-known authorities in the tech security world. You’ll learn detailed information on cloud computing security that-until now-has been sorely lacking.

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Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide

By David S. Linthicum

Addison-Wesley Professional, September 2009

ISBN: 9780321659392

264 pages, $49.99 US

Massive, disruptive change is coming to IT as Software as a Service (SaaS), SOA, mashups, Web 2.0, and cloud computing truly come of age. Writing for IT executives, architects, and developers alike, David S. Linthicum explains why the days of managing IT organizations as private fortresses will rapidly disappear as IT inevitably becomes a global community. He demonstrates how to run IT when critical elements of customer, product, and business data and processes extend far beyond the firewall. He also shows how to use all of that information to deliver real-time answers about everything from an individual customer’s credit to the location of a specific cargo container. This book offers a clear-eyed assessment of the challenges associated with this new world—and offers a step-by-step program for getting there with a maximum return on investment at a minimum risk.

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A Quick Start Guide to Cloud Computing: Moving your Business into the Cloud

By Mark I. Williams

Kogan Page, November 2010

ISBN: 9780749461300

151 pages, $14.95 US

This book cuts through the industry hype and confusion surrounding cloud computing, creating an understanding and helping executives to select those cloud computing solutions and service providers that can best improve the way they do business. If you are involved in directing IT strategy, this book contains tips, tools and checklists that can help you make the right choices for your business and reject solutions that fix problems you do not have.

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The Cloud at Your Service: The when, how, and why of enterprise cloud computing

By Jothy Rosenberg; Arthur Mateos

Manning Publications, October 2010

ISBN: 9781935182528

200 pages, $29.99 US

As an economically viable way for businesses of all sizes to distribute computing, cloud computing shows tremendous promise. But the intense hype surrounding the Cloud is making it next to impossible for responsible IT managers and business decision-makers to get a clear understanding of what the Cloud really means, what it might do for them, when it is practical, and what their future with the Cloud looks like. This book helps cut through all of this fog to help enterprises make critical decisions based upon facts and the authors’ informed unbiased recommendations and predictions.

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SOA Governance: Governing Shared Services On-Premise and in the Cloud

By Thomas Erl; Stephen G. Bennett; Clive Gee; Benjamin Carlyle; Robert Laird; Anne Thomas Manes; Robert Moores; Robert Schneider; Leo Shuster; Andre Tost; Chris Venable; Filippos Santas

Prentice Hall, April 2011

ISBN: 9780132478373

704 pages, $49.99 US

Authored by world-renowned experts in the fields of SOA, IT governance, and cloud computing, this comprehensive book provides clear direction as to what does and does not constitute SOA governance and then steps the reader through the most important industry governance practices, as they pertain to individual SOA project lifecycle stages. With a consistent, vendor-neutral focus, and with the help of case study examples, the authors demonstrate how to define and position precepts, organizational roles, processes, standards, and metrics. You will benefit from thorough and visually depicted cross-references and mapping between roles, processes, precepts, and project stages, enabling you to fully explore dynamics and dependencies and thereby learn how to use these governance controls to create your own custom SOA governance systems. This important title will be valuable to every practitioner concerned with making SOA work, including senior IT managers, project managers, architects, analysts, developers, administrators, QA professionals, security specialists, and cloud computing professionals.

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Building Applications in the Cloud: Concepts, Patterns, and Projects

By Christopher M. Moyer

Addison-Wesley Professional, April 2011

ISBN: 9780132107891

400 pages, $39.99 US

Putting your company’s applications in the cloud will no doubt save your IT department time and money—but it’s very often a more challenging proposition than you might expect. With this book, Chris Moyer has created a handy reference of patterns and techniques to properly leverage the benefits the cloud can provide. Readers who have been handed a project and told to “make it scale” can flip through the patterns provided here to get ideas and see what fits the project at hand. Use this book to get a lay of the land and guide your cloud project to successful scalability.

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Cloud Security: A Comprehensive Guide to Secure Cloud Computing

By Ronald L. Krutz; Russell Dean Vines

John Wiley & Sons, August 2010

ISBN: 9780470589878

384 pages, $50.00 US

Cloud computing allows both large and small organizations to have the opportunity to use Internet-based services so that they can reduce start-up costs, lower capital expenditures, use services on a pay-as-you-use basis, access applications only as needed, and quickly reduce or increase capacities. These benefits, however, are accompanied by a myriad of security issues, and this valuable book tackles the most common security challenges that cloud computing faces. The authors offer you years of unparalleled expertise and knowledge as they discuss the extremely challenging topics of data ownership, privacy protections, data mobility, quality of service and service levels, bandwidth costs, data protection, and support. As the most current and complete guide to helping you find your way through a maze of security minefields, this book is mandatory reading if you are involved in any aspect of cloud computing.

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Cloud Computing: Web-Based Applications That Change the Way You Work and Collaborate Online

By Michael Miller

Que, August 2008

ISBN: 9780768686227

312 pages, $24.99 US

With cloud computing, everything you do is now web-based instead of being desktop-based; you can access all your programs and documents from any computer that’s connected to the Internet. Whether you want to share photographs with your family, coordinate volunteers for a community organization, or manage a multi-faceted project in a large organization, cloud computing can help you do it more easily than ever before. If you want to learn about cloud computing, start with this book.

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Development with the Force.com Platform: Building Business Applications in the Cloud, Second Edition

By Jason Ouellette

Addison-Wesley Professional, July 2011

ISBN: 9780321767356

496 pages, $49.99 US

This is the first book that brings together all of the practical, technical guidance you need to make the most of Force.com in your own custom enterprise applications. Leading Force.com developer Jason Ouellette helps you identify suitable uses for Force.com and provides all of the insights and sample code needed to rapidly prototype, deploy, and integrate with production-quality Force.com applications. Ouellette provides realistic code examples at every step, emphasizing maintainability, flexibility, and interoperability throughout.

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Cloud Computing with Amazon Web Services LiveLessons

By Bernard Golden; Jorge Noa

Addison-Wesley Professional, July 2010

ISBN: 9780321705563

5 hours 34 minutes, $49.50 US

Cloud computing expert Bernard Golden provides easy-to-follow instructions in this video that will allow you to get up and running with the Amazon Web Services platform in no time. This video covers three key elements of working with AWS: Creating, launching, and shutting down EC2 instances; Storage and persistence in AWS environments; and managing AWS-based instances and managing applications in AWS environments. Further, this video provides a set of best practices for working with S3, Elastic Book Store, and SimpleDB.

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Silver Clouds, Dark Linings: A Concise Guide to Cloud Computing

By Archie Reed; Stephen G. Bennett

Prentice Hall, September 2010

ISBN: 9780132599672

178 pages

In this concise, executive level book, leading experts Archie Reed and Stephen G. Bennett share the insights and guidance decision-makers need to drive maximum value from cloud services—and avoid the pitfalls.The authors explain what cloud computing is, how it works, who provides cloud services, and how companies are using them. They walk through the entire cloud lifecycle, offering expert guidance on planning, governance, compliance, security, operations, administration, management, and more.

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Developing Applications for the Cloud on the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform

By Eugenio Pace; Dominic Betts; Scott Densmore; Ryan Dunn; Masashi Narumoto; Matias Woloski Microsoft Press, November 2010

ISBN: 9780735656239

168 pages, $29.99 US

This book demonstrates how you can create from scratch a multi-tenant, Software as a Service (SaaS) application to run in the cloud by using the latest versions of the Windows Azure tools and the latest features of the Windows Azure platform. The book is intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates applications and services that run on or interact with the cloud. Although applications do not need to be based on the Microsoft Windows operating system to work in Windows Azure, this book is written for people who work with Windows-based systems.

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Moving Applications to the Cloud

By Eugenio Pace; Dominic Betts; Scott Densmore; Ryan Dunn; Masashi Narumoto; Matias Woloski

Microsoft Press, September 2010

ISBN: 9780735651784

176 pages, $29.99 US

This book is the first volume in a planned series about the Windows Azure platform and focuses on a migration scenario. It introduces a fictitious company named Adatum, which step-by-step modifies its expense tracking and reimbursement system, aExpense, so that it can be deployed to Windows Azure. Each chapter explores different considerations: authentication and authorization, data access, session management, deployment, development life cycle and cost analysis.

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Chapter 9. Amazon Web Services: EC2, S3, EMR, & SimpleDB

This sections covers topics from the most popular cloud computing provider: Amazon Web Services. Titles introduce readers to AWS and show them how to port existing applications to AWS. Other titles in this section provide detailed instruction into services that AWS provides.

Programming Amazon EC2

By Jurg van Vliet; Flavia Paganelli

O’Reilly Media, March 2011

ISBN: 9781449303617

184 pages, $34.99 US

If you plan to build applications to run on Amazon’s Web Services, this is precisely the book you need. Programming Amazon EC2 provides architects, developers, and administrators with an end-to-end approach to designing and building a practical application on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a central part of the AWS platform. You’ll focus on critical issues such as load balancing, scaling, monitoring, and automation in the process.

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Amazon Web Services: Migrating your .NET Enterprise Application

By Rob Linton

Packt Publishing, July 2011

ISBN: 9781849681940

336 pages, $49.99 US

This step-by-step guide to moving your Enterprise .NET application to Amazon covers not only the concept, technical design, and strategy, but also enlightens you about the business strategy and in-depth implementation details involved in moving an application to Amazon. You’ll discover how to map your requirements against the Amazon Cloud, as well as secure and enhance your application with AWS. After comparing the existing application with the newly migrated version, it then moves on to explain how to make the hosted application better. It covers how to leverage some of the scalability and redundancy built into the Cloud, and along the way you’ll learn about all of the major AWS products like EC2, S3, and EBS.

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Programming Amazon Web Services, 1st edition

By James Murty

O’Reilly Media, March 2008

ISBN: 9780596515812

608 pages, $49.99 US

This book demonstrates how developers working with small- to mid-sized companies can take advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as the Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Queue Service (SQS), Flexible Payments Service (FPS), and SimpleDB to build web-scale business applications. With AWS, Amazon offers a new paradigm for IT infrastructure: use what you need, as you need it, and pay as you go. This book explains how you can access Amazon’s open APIs to store and run applications, rather than spend precious time and resources building your own. Whether you’re starting a new online business, need to ramp up existing services, or require an offsite backup for your home, this book gives you the background and the practical knowledge you need to start using AWS. Other books explain how to build web services. This book teaches businesses how to take make use of existing services from an established technology leader.

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Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide

By Prabhakar Chaganti; Rich Helms

Packt Publishing, June 2010

ISBN: 9781847197344

252 pages, $35.99 US

This practical book aims to address your preconceptions on how SimpleDB will work for you. You will be quickly led through the differences between relational databases and SimpleDB, and the implications of using SimpleDB. Throughout this book, there is an emphasis on demonstrating key concepts with practical examples for Java, PHP, and Python developers. You will be introduced to this massively scalable schema-less key-value data store: what it is, how it works, and why it is such a game-changer. You will then explore the basic functionality offered by SimpleDB including querying, code samples, and a lot more. This book will help you deploy services outside the Amazon cloud and access them from any web host.

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Elastic Beanstalk

By Jurg van Vliet; Flavia Paganelli; Steven van Wel; Dara Dowd

O’Reilly Media, July 2011

ISBN: : 9781449306649

86 pages, $29.99 US

While it has always been possible to run Java applications on EC2, Elastic Beanstalk makes it trivially simple. This book shows Java developers how to take advantage of EBS to automate deploying their applications to the cloud.

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Chapter 10. Hadoop & Related Projects (Nutch, Solr, Lucene, Hive, Zookeeper, Pig)

The Apache Hadoop project is an open-source software framework for distributed computing. Topics in this section show devlopers how to solve big data problems with this framework.

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide

By Tom White

O’Reilly Media, October 2010

ISBN: 9781449398644

626 pages, $49.99 US

Apache Hadoop is ideal for organizations with a growing need to store and process massive application datasets. With this book developers will find details for analyzing large datasets with Hadoop, and administrators will learn how to set up and run Hadoop clusters. The book includes case studies that illustrate how Hadoop is used to solve specific problems.

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Hadoop in Action

By Chuck Lam

Manning Publications, December 2010

ISBN: 9781935182191

336 pages, $44.99 US

This book leads you from obtaining a copy of Hadoop to setting it up in a cluster and writing data analytic programs. The book begins by making the basic idea of Hadoop and MapReduce easier to grasp by applying the default Hadoop installation to a few easy-to-follow tasks, such as analyzing changes in word frequency across a body of documents. The book continues through the basic concepts of MapReduce applications developed using Hadoop, including a close look at framework components, use of Hadoop for a variety of data analysis tasks, and numerous examples of Hadoop in action. This book takes you beyond the mechanics of running Hadoop, teaching you to write meaningful programs in a MapReduce framework.

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Pro Hadoop

By Jason Venner

Apress, June 2009

ISBN: 9781430219422

440 pages, $39.99 US

This book brings you up to speed on Hadoop. You learn the ins and outs of MapReduce; how to structure a cluster, design, and implement the Hadoop file system; and how to build your first cloud–computing tasks using Hadoop. Learn how to let Hadoop take care of distributing and parallelizing your software—you just focus on the code, Hadoop takes care of the rest. Written from the perspective of a principal engineer with down–in–the–trenches knowledge of what to do wrong with Hadoop, you learn how to avoid the common, expensive first errors that everyone makes with creating their own Hadoop system or inheriting someone else’s.

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How to Develop Big Data Applications for Hadoop

By Ken Krugler; Shevek M; Chris Wensel; Abe Taha

O’Reilly Media, February 2011

ISBN: 9781449305796

Running Time: 2 hours 25 minutes, $29.99 US

Distributed applications running on Hadoop clusters can deliver powerful insights and results from the biggest data sets ever generated. But do you have to be a rocket scientist to use it? Fortunately, the answer is no. This video will explain the theory of MapReduce and how to develop big data applications in Java and higher level languages such as Pig and Hive SQL.

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Deriving Intelligence from Large Data Using Hadoop and Applying Analytics

By Vineet Tyagi

O’Reilly Media, March 2011

ISBN: 9781449306267

Running Time: 37 minutes, $9.99 US

Organizations today possess massive data - in tera- and petabytes - that needs to be effectively collected, stored and processed. Hadoop is a cost effective option that helps manage this big data. To derive real returns from these big data systems, one needs to extract useful insights and business intelligence, and this video is the place to look for this information.

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Lucene in Action, Second Edition

By Michael McCandless; Erik Hatcher; Otis Gospodnetic

Manning Publications, May 2010

ISBN: 9781933988177

475 pages, $49.99 US

Lucene now powers search in diverse companies including Akamai, Netflix, LinkedIn, Technorati, HotJobs, Epiphany, FedEx, Mayo Clinic, MIT, New Scientist Magazine, and many others. Lucene still delivers high-performance search features in a disarmingly easy-to-use API. Due to its vibrant and diverse open-source community of developers and users, Lucene is relentlessly improving, with evolutions to APIs, significant new features such as payloads, and a huge increase (as much as 8x) in indexing speed with Lucene 2.3. And with clear writing, reusable examples, and unmatched advice on best practices, this book continues to be the definitive guide to developing with Lucene.

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Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server

By David Smiley; Eric Pugh

Packt Publishing, August 2009

ISBN: 9781847195883

336 pages, $44.99 US

If you are a developer building a high-traffic web site, you need to have a terrific search engine. Sites like Netflix.com and Zappos.com employ Solr, an open source enterprise search server, which uses and extends the Lucene search library. This book is a comprehensive reference guide for every feature Solr has to offer. It serves the reader right from initiation to development to deployment. It also comes with complete running examples to demonstrate its use and show how to integrate it with other languages and frameworks.

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Real-Time Searching of Big Data with Solr and Hadoop

By Rod Cope

O’Reilly Media, March 2011

ISBN: 9781449306090

Running Time: 47 minutes, $9.99 US

Hadoop and HBase make it easy to store terabytes of data, but how do you scale your search mechanism to sift through these mountains of bits and retrieve large result sets in a matter of milliseconds? Careful use of the Solr search server, based on Lucene, made these requirements come to life in the production environment found in this video. Come learn how we query terabytes of data in a highly available system.

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Avro Data

By Doug Cutting

O’Reilly Media, March 2011

ISBN: 9781449306113

Running Time: 47 minutes, $9.99 US

Apache Avro provides an expressive, efficient standard for representing large data sets. Avro data is programming-language neutral and MapReduce-friendly. Hopefully it can replace gzipped CSV-like formats as a dominant format for data. Take a look at this video to learn more.

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Chapter 11. MySQL

MySQL is a tried and true open source database. This section presents titles that readers can leverage to get the most of MySQL

High Performance MySQL, Second Edition

By Baron Schwartz; Peter Zaitsev; Vadim Tkachenko; Jeremy D. Zawodny; Arjen Lentz; Derek J. Balling

O’Reilly Media, June 2008

ISBN: 9780596101718

712 pages, $49.99 US

This book is the definitive guide to building fast, reliable systems with MySQL. Written by noted experts with years of real-world experience building very large systems, this book covers every aspect of MySQL performance in detail, and focuses on robustness, security, and data integrity. It teaches you advanced techniques in depth so you can bring out MySQL’s full power. Learn how to design schemas, indexes, queries and advanced MySQL features for maximum performance, and get detailed guidance for tuning your MySQL server, operating system, and hardware to their fullest potential. You’ll also learn practical, safe, high-performance ways to scale your applications with replication, load balancing, high availability, and failover. This second edition is completely revised and greatly expanded, with deeper coverage in all areas.

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MySQL Administrator’s Bible

By Sheeri K. Cabral; Keith Murphy

John Wiley & Sons, May 2009

ISBN: 9780470416914

888 pages, $49.99 US

With special focus on the next major release of MySQL, this book provides a solid framework for anyone new to MySQL or transitioning from another database platform, as well as experienced MySQL administrators. The high-profile author duo provides essential coverage of the fundamentals of MySQL database management—including MySQL’s unique approach to basic database features and functions—as well as coverage of SQL queries, data and index types, stores procedure and functions, triggers and views, and transactions. They also present comprehensive coverage of such topics as MySQL server tuning, managing storage engines, caching, backup and recovery, managing users, index tuning, database and performance monitoring, security, and more.

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MySQL, Fourth Edition

By Paul DuBois

Addison-Wesley Professional, August 2008

ISBN: 9780768678673

1224 pages, $54.99 US

In this book, Paul DuBois provides a comprehensive guide to using and administering MySQL effectively and productively. He describes everything from the basics of getting information into a database and formulating queries, to using MySQL with PHP or Perl to generate dynamic web pages, to writing your own programs that access MySQL databases, to administering MySQL servers. The fourth edition of this bestselling book has been meticulously revised and updated to thoroughly cover the latest features and capabilities of MySQL 5.0, as well as to add new coverage of features introduced with MySQL 5.1.

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MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide

By Paul DuBois; Stefan Hinz; Carsten Pedersen

MySQL Press, August 2005

ISBN: 9780672328121

672 pages, $64.99 US

This is the official guide to passing the two MySQL certification tests for MySQL 5, the long-awaited major revision of MySQL. MySQL professionals need a way to distinguish themselves from the vast majority of database administrators and developers. With more than 4 million active installations, MySQL is the world’s most popular open-source database. The MySQL certification tests, available at over 3,000 PearsonVUE testing centers, is a key component of this enterprise growth strategy, establishing a base level of skills for database users, administrators and programmers. This book is a reliable way for MySQL users, developers, and administrators to prepare for either of the MySQL tests.

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Learning MySQL

By Seyed M.M. Tahaghoghi; Hugh E. Williams

O’Reilly Media, November 2006

ISBN: 9780596008642

624 pages, $44.99 US

This densely packed book includes detailed instructions to help you set up and design an effective database, create powerful queries using SQL, configure MySQL for improved security, and squeeze information out of your data. After covering the basics, the book travels far into MySQL’s subtleties, including complex queries and joins, how to interact with the database over the Web using PHP or Perl, and important house-keeping such as backups and security.

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Chapter 12. No SQL Data Stores (MongoDB, Cassandra)

Massive amounts of data call for new methods of not only processing but also storing data. This section covers titles which use No SQL technology to store massive amounts of data.

The Definitive Guide to MongoDB: The NoSQL Database for Cloud and Desktop Computing

By Eelco Plugge; Peter Membrey; Tim Hawkins

Apress, September 2010

ISBN: 9781430230519

327 pages, $44.99 US

MongoDB, a cross-platform NoSQL database, is the fastest-growing new database in the world. MongoDB provides a rich document orientated structure with dynamic queries that you’ll recognize from RDMBS offerings such as MySQL. This is a book about a NoSQL database that does not require the SQL crowd to re-learn how the database world works, since MongoDB has reached 1.0 and already boasts 50,000+ users. The community is strong and vibrant and MongoDB is improving at a fast rate. With scalable and fast databases becoming critical for today’s applications, this book shows you how to install, administer and program MongoDB without pretending SQL never existed.

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Building a NoSQL Data Cloud

By Krishna Sankar

O’Reilly Media, July 2010

ISBN: 9781449396428

Running Time: 2 hours 57 minutes, $99.99 US

This video provides an in-depth tutorial on various forms of NOSQL (NotOnlySQL) datastores (key/value, data structure store, document store and wide column stores) for working with semi-structured data. The data ranges from web logs to social and knowledge graphs to configuration data stores for cloud infrastructures and other domains.

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Cassandra: The Definitive Guide

By Eben Hewitt

O’Reilly Media, December 2010

ISBN: 9781449399764

336 pages, $39.99 US

The rising popularity of Apache Cassandra rests on its ability to handle very large data sets that include hundreds of terabytes—and that’s why this distributed database has been chosen by organizations such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Rackspace. With this hands-on guide, you’ll get all the details and practical examples you need to understand Cassandra’s non-relational database design and put it to work in a production environment. The author pays special attention to data modeling, and demonstrates Cassandra’s many advantages, including its high availability, eventual consistency model, and ability to scale easily. If you’re a developer with a startup, you’ll learn how to future-proof your application by implementing Cassandra before your storage needs become critical. Join the growing list data-intensive organizations that have come to rely on Cassandra’s design.

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Cassandra High Performance Cookbook

By Edward Capriolo

Packt Publishing, July 2011

ISBN: 9781849515122

324 pages, $40.49 US

Apache Cassandra is a fault-tolerant, distributed data store which offers linear scalability allowing it to be a storage platform for large high volume websites. This book provides detailed recipes that describe how to use the features of Cassandra and improve its performance. Recipes cover topics ranging from setting up Cassandra for the first time to complex multiple data center installations. The recipe format presents the information in a concise actionable form. The book describes in detail how features of Cassandra can be tuned and what the possible effects of tuning can be. Recipes include how to access data stored in Cassandra and use third party tools to help you out. The book also describes how to monitor and do capacity planning to ensure it is performing at a high level. Towards the end, it takes you through the use of libraries and third party applications with Cassandra and Cassandra integration with Hadoop.

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Hands-on Cassandra

By Eric Evans

O’Reilly Media, July 2010

ISBN: 9781449396404

Running Time: 2 hours 17 minutes, $99.99 US

Apache Cassandra is a robust second-generation distributed database. Its write-optimized shared-nothing architecture results in massive scalability, making it a popular choice at organizations such as Twitter, Digg, and Rackspace. This video covers the step-by-step setup of a single-node instance of Cassandra, before moving on to explore Twissandra, a simple Twitter clone written in Python and Django. Finally, best practices for provisioning and supporting a production cluster are presented.

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Apache Cassandra in Action

By Jonathan Ellis

O’Reilly Media, February 2011

ISBN: 9781449305789

Running Time: 3 hours 4 minutes, $29.99 US

Apache Cassandra is a second-generation distributed database originally open-sourced by Facebook. Its write-optimized shared-nothing architecture results in excellent performance and scalability. Follow along in this video that covers in-depth information on Cassandra presented by Jonathan Ellis, the cofounder of Cassandra.

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MongoDB: The Definitive Guide

By Kristina Chodorow; Michael Dirolf

O’Reilly Media, September 2010

ISBN: 9781449381578

216 pages, $39.99 US

Discover how MongoDB can help you manage a huMONGOus amount of data collected through your web application. This book covers the basic principles and advanced uses of this document-oriented database, and demonstrates why MongoDB is scalable, high-performance, and reliable. This authoritative introduction, written by two software engineers from the company that develops this open-source database, offers guidance for programmers and advanced configuration for system administrators.

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50 Tips and Tricks for MongoDB Developers

By Kristina Chodorow

O’Reilly Media, April 2011

ISBN: 9781449306779

66 pages, $27.99 US

This book is a collection of tips, tricks, and hacks to help MongoDB developers get the most out of the software. The tips cover everything from application design to data safety and monitoring.

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Scaling MongoDB

Kristina Chodorow

O’Reilly Media, March 2011

ISBN: 9781449303679

60 pages, $29.99 US

Learn how to create large MongoDB clusters with this title! It shows how to use MongoDB efficiently for very large databases, covering sharding, cluster setup, and administration.

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Chapter 13. Visualization

Data analysis and mining are difficult to use if they are not presented to users in a way they can understand. This section introduces visualization and a number of popular titles that show readers how to clearly express information.

Beautiful Visualization

By Julie Steele; Noah Iliinsky

O’Reilly Media, June 2010

ISBN: 9781449379865

416 pages, $59.99 US

With contributions from more than two dozen experts, this book demonstrates why visualizations are beautiful, not only for their aesthetic design, but also for elegant layers of detail that efficiently generate insight and new understanding. Think of the familiar map of the New York City subway system, or a diagram of the human brain. These older examples have been surpassed by artists, designers, commentators, scientists, analysts, statisticians, and others who show how visualizations using today’s digital capabilities can help us make sense of the world.

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Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics

By Nathan Yau

John Wiley & Sons, July 2011

ISBN: 9780470944882

384 pages, $39.99 US

Data is ever-increasing and can be overwhelming to organize in a way that makes sense to its intended audience. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could actually visualize data to maximize its potential and tell a story in a clear, concise manner? Well, with this book you can. It explains how to gather, parse, and format data and then design high quality graphics that help you explore and present patterns, outliers, and relationships. Along the way you will be exposed to tools that visualize data-native graphics for the Web, such as ActionScript, Flash libraries, PHP, and JavaScript, along with tools to design graphics for print, such as R and Illustrator.

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Applied Security Visualization

By Raffael Marty

Addison-Wesley Professional, August, 2008

ISBN: 9780321510105

552 pages, $54.99 US

As networks become ever more complex, securing them becomes more and more difficult. The solution is visualization. Using today’s state-of-the-art data visualization techniques, you can gain a far deeper understanding of what’s happening on your network right now. You can uncover hidden patterns of data, identify emerging vulnerabilities and attacks, and respond decisively with countermeasures that are far more likely to succeed than conventional methods. In this book you will learn how to use visualization to perform broad network security analyses, assess specific threats, and even improve business compliance.

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Visualizing Data

By Ben Fry

O’Reilly Media, December, 2007

ISBN: 9780596514556

384 pages, $39.99 US

Enormous quantities of data go unused or underused today, simply because people can’t visualize the quantities and relationships in it. This book demonstrates methods for representing data accurately on the Web and elsewhere, complete with user interaction, animation, and more. This book teaches you how to design entire interfaces around large, complex data sets with the help of a powerful new design and prototyping tool called “Processing,” which is used by many researchers and companies to convey specific data in a clear and understandable manner. With chapters divided by types of data rather than types of display, you’ll learn how each visualization conveys the unique properties of the data it represents—why the data was collected, what’s interesting about it, and what stories it can tell.

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Getting Started with Processing

By Casey Reas; Ben Fry

O’Reilly Media, June, 2010

ISBN: 9781449379803

208 pages, $19.99 US

Learn computer programming the easy way with Processing, a simple language that lets you use code to create drawings, animation, and interactive graphics. Programming courses usually start with theory, but this book lets you jump right into creative and fun projects. It’s ideal for anyone who wants to learn basic programming, and serves as a simple introduction to graphics for people with some programming skills.

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Information Dashboard Design

By Stephen Few

O’Reilly Media, January, 2006

ISBN: 9780596100162

224 pages, $34.99 US

Dashboards have become popular in recent years as uniquely powerful tools for communicating important information at a glance. Although dashboards are potentially powerful, this potential is rarely realized. The greatest display technology in the world won’t solve this if you fail to use effective visual design. And if a dashboard fails to tell you precisely what you need to know in an instant, you’ll never use it, even if it’s filled with cute gauges, meters, and traffic lights. Don’t let your investment in dashboard technology go to waste. This book will teach you the visual design skills you need to create dashboards that communicate clearly, rapidly, and compellingly.

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