More resources
Kaggle competitions:
Kaggle runs data mining competitions regularly, often with monetary prizes. Testing your skills on Kaggle competitions is a fast and great way to learn to work with real-world data mining problems. The forums are nice and share environments—often, you will see code released for a top-10 entry during the competition!
Coursera:
Coursera contains many courses on data mining and data science. Many of the courses are specialized such as big data and image processing. A great general one to start with is Andrew Ng's famous course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning/.
It is a bit more advanced than this book and would be a great next step for interested readers.
For neural networks, check out this course: https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets.
If you complete all of these, try out the course on probabilistic graphical models at https://www.coursera.org/course/pgm.
