About this book
Collective Intelligence in Action is a practical book for applying collective intelligence to real-world web applications. I cover a broad spectrum of topics, from simple illustrative examples that explain the concepts and the math behind them, to the ideal architecture for developing a feature, to the database schema, to code implementation and use of open source toolkits. Regardless of your background and nature of development, I’m sure you’ll find the examples and code samples useful. You should be able to directly use the code developed in this book. This is a practical book and I present a holistic view on what’s required to apply these techniques in the real world. Consequently, the book discusses the architectures for implementing intelligence—you’ll find lots of diagrams, especially UML diagrams, and a number of screenshots from well-known sites, in addition to code listings and even database schema designs.
There are a plethora of examples. Typically, concepts and the underlying math for algorithms are explained via examples with detailed step-by-step analysis. Accompanying the examples is Java code that demonstrates the concepts by implementing them, or by using open source frameworks.