Who this book is for

This book is for programmers who want to get started in data mining in an application-focused manner.

If you haven't programmed before, I strongly recommend that you learn at least the basics before you get started. This book doesn't introduce programming, nor does it give too much time to explain the actual implementation (in code) of how to type out the instructions. That said, once you go through the basics, you should be able to come back to this book fairly quickly—there is no need to be an expert programmer first!

I highly recommend that you have some Python programming experience. If you don't, feel free to jump in, but you might want to take a look at some Python code first, possibly focusing on tutorials using the IPython Notebook. Writing programs in the IPython Notebook works a little differently than other methods such as writing a Java program in a fully fledged IDE.