The 5 best Computer Science books I read in 2015

Beautiful Data: hints on data visualizations and storytelling. Full of real world examples, tips and advices every data scientist must know. Real stories about ETL practices and Data Warehouses, data-driven and high quality models. Special attention to chapter #13 “What Data doesn’t do”: ask your data significant questions and be aware of your goals during any data analysis.

Collective Intelligence: if you want a good introduction about the most important machine learning topics such as Clustering, Classification, Optimization, and Recommended Systems you can bet on this book. The discussion parts of each algorithm (including drawbacks and advantages) are valuable. Python implementations of the examples are straightforward to understand.

Big Data, Data Mining, and Machine Learning: what is Big Data? What’s the role of Data Mining in Big Data scenarios? Where to apply Machine Learning models? Why those things are so important today? This book tries to respond those questions employing an interesting approach: describing earlier historical developments in hardware and distributed systems, providing an overview of different predictive models, and introducing details about current trends and applications of those technologies and methods. Really enjoyable reading.

Biometric and Intelligent Decision Making Support: an impressive number of Computational Intelligence applications based on a huge literature review. Strongly recommend to understand where Decision Support Systems are required and how they can incorporate biometric information in, for instance, voice recognition and self-assignment problems. Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and Fuzzy Sets are discussed here as models to provide intelligent behavior.

Case-Based Reasoning: a complete guide to create Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems. CBR is a human-like reasoning mechanism of problem solving where a solution for a new problem is obtained by using knowledge from past solved problems. Similarity assessment, vocabulary construction, knowledge representations are covered by this book in a simple language. Strongly recommend to beginners in this research field.