The Data Science Handbook: Advice and Insights from 25 Amazing Data Scientists

Excellent conditions I’ll recommend this book.

Great for any data scientists! Very insightful and intriguing book!

Awesome insights about being a data scientist

The Data Science Handbook gathers 25 interviews of Data Scientists. Interviews are well done, most questions depending on the previous answer. This gives a nice feeling of discussion between the interviewer and the Data Scientist. On the content side, it provides interesting insights about the job of Data Scientist. The book is however biased towards pioneers in the field spending 14h a day working, which is definitely not representative of the overall Data Scientist population. The 25 interviews are covering all major Data Science topics, including data preparation, automation, Big Data, the role of the Data Scientist and moving from academy to industry. Although some of the selected Data Scientists are clearly well known (DJ Patil, Hilary Mason, etc.), others are quite new to the field. It looks like they have been interviewed because they knew the editors or work for a “trendy” company. I would have rather chosen to include other key Data Scientists such as Dean Abbott, John Elder, Eric Siegel and Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro. The book still remains a great source of inspiration for experienced Data Scientists.

Great book!

I have a somewhat different take on this book than the other two reviews posted to date. However, I've read them both, and they're legitimately laudatory, so please read on. I posted a brief review on Quora.com -- where I first read about the book -- as follows: "Interesting reading. I was expecting/hoping for a little more in the way of case studies, food for thought about conceptualization of data requirements and use of big data, etc. However, if you have an entrepreneurial bent or are interested in understanding more about how some of the number wizards look at industry uses of data, it's worth a read." To amplify on this take, I'd like to make it clear that I approached it from a general reader's perspective... as a potential user of big data and as someone looking to learn more about how to make the leap from owning a bucketful of information to turning it into real knowledge. That kind of work is still needed; this isn't it. The worlds of data science and customers of the fruits of data science still are pretty widely separated. That said, this book appears to be an excellent atlas to the specialty and the solid guide to the best route toward formation of data science practitioners (although definitely outside my experience enough that at least a good chunk of its wisdom probably was lost on me). I also got a sense that it offers insights that might help data scientists become better at reaching out to potential users of their services, which also would be a positive. So, for those in the target audience, possessing at least some of the basic quantitative and analytic skills the field requires, I'd unequivocally endorse this book. For others (like me), it can serve as a means of understanding at least some of the skill set that can be expected of data science practitioners. However, it's a lot tougher read without at least some background in the area, and I have a strong sense that I didn't get everything out of it that was there for data science cognoscenti.

The Data Science Handbook is a very interesting book in the sense that it reminded me of another book named "Founders at Work" written by Jessica Livingston.(Link here : http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1430210788) Both of the books posses similar formats which is to create a collection of interviews of people from respective domains which are data science and entrepreneurship. The book focuses more on the 'life-story' of some of the reputed data scientists working in different companies, either as employees or as founder of companies. The authors asked the data scientists about their early life, what motivated them to enter the industry or how they started working in the data science domain, what courses they took during undergraduate or graduate studies that helped them to enter the industry and afterwards and how they think that data science will be impacting future. What I liked most about the book is that they included stories from data scientists who transitioned from employment to entrepreneurship. I don't think there are that many people available who did that yet. Yes, there's Quid, Kaggle, Datarobot etc but I don't know many. Also, the stories were very diverse since all 25 scientists are currently focusing on different domains. For example, there's this interview from Riley Newman who's from AirBNB and Airbnb is a relatively new company, but there's also the interview from Drew Conway, who's famous for his coining of the data science ven-diagram ; Sean Gourley is well-known for his application of mathematical modelling to middle-east war, while Jace Kohlmeier switched from high frequency trading to help Khan Academy in revolutionizing education and self learning. There are also interviews of people from Facebook (company), Palantir Technologies and some more niche companies which I didn't know before because they are not completely consumer focused or their customers aren't in my age group. It's noticeable that all the people in the book talked about the importance of effective communication for a data scientist and valued the ability to ask good questions. Almost everyone also talked about the value of strong coding, visualization and experimental design skills. My personal favorite so far would be Sean Gourley because I basically liked his working style during PHD. Unlike other students who generally try to stay in a narrow problem, he followed his curiosity and started modelling war in middle east of all things. Terrorism also happens to one of my key-interests, even though I've always been interested in terrorist psychology over their team networks, so I liked his interview tremendously. He has good insights on how to transition from data science to and as I told before entrepreneurship. He also seemed to be interested in making people data-literate and focused the importance of data scientists gaining more decision-making power. I personally don't believe that storytelling or working as an evangelist is the only thing that data scientists can or should focus on in near future, getting the decision making power as founders or politicians is important and more people will eventually be interested in it, despite what people think about 'millennials' right now. So it was refreshing to know that there are other people who are thinking in my ways. I also really liked the John Foreman interview, who happens to be the chief data scientist of MailChimp, he focused on creating different metrics for user experience which might be considered 'creative' in so-many ways because they focus on the human-dimension more than the conversion rate only. For example, he talked about how they put billboards of Mailchimp logo(with a chimp in it!) to create a personal joke between the user and the company even if they don't know how many users convert after watching their logo, which is likely to be small because they didn't put their company name there. These kind of things matter for me because I feel like that it's true that user experience design decisions can/should be heavily influenced by data but in the end human dimensions and our decision making style also influence our perception to users a lot more than we generally think. He doesn't seem to like Kaggle competitions much , while I am interested in getting better in Kaggle, but well, it's better to get different perspectives. I'm glad that this book didn't focus much on things like "What is data science? How can we define it?" style conceptual questions, mostly because I feel like that if one person can 'define' a whole growing industry in a narrow way, then that industry must not be neither big nor high growth which is not true when it comes to data science. It's true that different people had different opinions on where data science is going, but that's more or less expected. Update : I received a free copy in exchange for this review here.

About the book: Data Science Handbook is a collection of in-depth interviews with 25 super smart Data Scientists who are well known for what they do. In Introduction section of the book, authors mention on which interviews will be useful to whom? Such as, aspiring Data Scientists should read interviews from Will, Clare and Diane. I would argue that irrespective of where you are in your career, all the interviews are equally helpful and amazing. For example, as a BI Consultant, who started studying Data Science recently, interviews of Drew Conway and Bradley Voytek were absolutely fantastic because Drew's interview introduced me to term Social Scientist and awesome stuff that he does with data science knowledge to make difference. Goods: Although authors would have prepared the list of questions before approaching these super busy people, the interviews feel natural and the follow up questions seem to be structured in such a way that encouraged and in case of people like Kunal Punera excited them to speak a lot more. With every interview, you find something new which kept me interested. For example, Dj Patil talking about Text Line. I had no idea about this initiative but once I read a bit more about it, I thought it was an amazing initiative. As a guy who does not live in US and isn't surrounded by news around these sort of projects, I loved how it introduced me to these projects. Highlight section throughout the book is well used and is informative. There is a variety of viewpoints on how to approach a career. For example, DJ rubbishes 10,000 hours rule and Luis Sanchez advocates 10,000 hours rule. There are other pieces of advice which are contradictory, which I believe is one of the strengths of the book. Also reminds me of the answer Soleio's answer to Why is advice largely useless? on Quora.com Recurrent theme among all the Scientists was to just do the project and not wait till you develop full stack of knowledge. Following quote by Joe Blitzstein sums it up well. It’s a dangerous way of thinking — that until you know X, Y, Z and W, you’re not going to be able to do data science. My Favourite Interview : Sean Gourley. Didn't know who he was before reading this interview Bads: None actually. I have never read Interview style book, so I have nothing to compare against. One thing I wish it had was a question "What are your favourite non-technical books?". I think people like myself who are reading this to become better thinker would have greatly benefited from answers to this one question. I browse around a lot to find how to think better and which books to read. Finding out their favourite non-technical book would have been a good help. For future versions, I wish it includes data scientists from other countries and not just US. I think Data scientists in developing countries such as India can add different flavor to the book. At the same time, Data scientists in countries such as Australia, may come up with ideas on how to initiate when there is no strong community around data. Overall, excellent book. I was going to pirate the book but became victim of William Chen 's experiment and paid under "Pay what you want" program. And it was totally worth it. [Disclosure: I have received a free physical copy of the book from authors]

If you like to read 3-page interviews of a lot of people to see who people in the data science area might be, can be of interest. Otherwise, if you're interested in any depth regarding data science, this is useless and completely lacks content of any kind.