Books

This page is a list of recommended books for Analytics, Data Mining, and Business Intelligence.

These books range from the beginner and DIY stuff, to the more advanced books on visualization and emerging techniques. I’ll try to put in some information (review, suggestions, excerpts) that should guide you to the kind of books you may be looking for. If you know some other books that you recommend, please drop me a note and I’ll add a review for the community.

If you are a manager who has just been sent off to find out about this new Business Intelligence beast, and to tame it for the organization, then Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager’s Guide would be a good place to begin. It is a great book to get started with. Gives a fairly comprehensive and detailed overview, with enough pointers to pick up and explore upon. A must-read.
Excerpt:
In the last few years, the ability to create, collect, and store information has widely outpaced our ability to make significant use of that information. Yet there is significant hidden value locked away in corporate databases, waiting to be discovered and exploited … Instead of treating data as the raw material that fuels a 19th-century-style assembly line masquerading as 20th-century information processing, we must learn how to think about a company’s data as a corporate information asset, one that can be manipulated in different ways for corporate benefit.

And if you are a practitioner (or aim to become one) then The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling (Second Edition) is the book you just cannot afford to miss. This is the book that tells you How to do Data warehousing and BI in a manner that delivers real value to real people.
Review:
“…this is the daddy of data warehousing process books. No other material available so concisely and precisely explains what is required from a data warehousing solution…this is a great book…” (Enterprise Server Magazine, July 2002)

If you know what regression means and broadly understand how it can be applied to various business problems, you may want a more hands on book that actually takes you through the process. For step-by-step instructions on how to define, scope, and solve data-mining problems using SAS you can read Data Mining Cookbook: Modeling Data for Marketing, Risk and Customer Relationship Management by Olivia Parr Rudd. The book lays down some common applications of data-mining, common considerations, issues and strategies, and gotchas in these fields. Even though the book gives detailed examples only in SAS, it’s still a good read for the choice of techniques, methodolgy, and examples.

This timeless classic on Visualization of complex information by Edward R. Tufte is the best book you can get on the subject. It sets the standards on what can be done using simple graphics to explain complex phenomena. “Visual Display of Quantitative Information” by Edward R Tufte is a not-to-be-missed classic that professionals swear by.
Quote:
Good graphic design reveals the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.