O’Reilly just just put up an offer for a pretty complete getting started
in data analysis library. It doesn’t say when the offer ends, but if you
are looking for some books on data manipulation, this might have
everything you are looking for.
(
Link)
Data Science Starter Kit
The Tools You Need to Get Started with Data
This kit includes everything you need from analysis, visualization, to
management.
“The success of companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix,
not to mention Wall Street firms and industries from manufacturing and
retail to healthcare, is increasingly driven by better tools for
extracting meaning from very large quantities of data. ‘Data
Scientist’ is now the hottest job title in Silicon Valley.” – Tim
O’Reilly
I’ve been a little slow posting, not sure it’s laziness or just wasn’t
feeling up to it. The main topic starting out was the certification item
Jim had mentioned. There was a discussion about a year ago on the SAGE
mailing list about such a thing and both Kelwin and I had both posted
responses.
I won’t post Kelwin’s response, but I will duplicate mine below:
Not wanting to sound like I’m in the extreme end of either
for vs. against certifications, I am a full time consultant and I live
in a government town. In order to even qualify to bid on government and
a large number of private sector contracts, I have to meet their
certification requirements. As all of the local agencies also have
large government contracts, they ask for them as well in order to
contact me with possible gigs. I happen to have a couple, mostly
taken at theurging of employers to meet some odd requirement.
Thanks to Jim, I’ve corrected the calendar entry. The meeting is next
week, not tonight (Oct 13). If you are looking for a meeting to atend
tonight, the ocbug (ocbug.ca) meeting is tonight.
Title: October Meeting
Location: The Second Cup, Bells Corners
Link out:
Click here
Description: We have a couple of topics for October:
- Documentation systems
- basically what systems do you use, what could we do better?
- Do you use a Wiki? a CMS? a spreadsheet? Google docs? etc.
- self-contained or db based?
- What works and what does not?
- Certifications - do they have any value?
- Who has certifications?
- Why do you have them?
- Have they helped?
- Should “I” get any/more?
- Do certifications help with my job?
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2011-10-13
End Time: 21:30
Title: September Meeting (Note that this is the LAST Thursday in the
month)
Location: The Second Cup, Bells Corners
Link out:
Click here
Description: As we had a very small turnout for the last meeting,
I’ll bring along some photos of the new firewall appliance I assembled
with components from pc engines. I’m quite impressed so far.
Hopefully we can stand another of my “doc” talks as well. If I’m
successful, I’ll provide the whole thing as an epub file.