Is it worth purchasing Mahout in Action to get up to speed with Mahout, or are there other better sources?

Question

I\'m currently a very casual user of Apache Mahout, and I\'m considering purchasing the book Mahout in Action. Unfortunately, I\'m having a really hard time getting an idea of h

Answer 1

You might also consider reading through Paco Nathan's Enterprise Data Workflows in Cascading. You can run PMML on your cluster exported from R or SAS. That is not to say anything bad about Mahout in Action, the authors did a great job and clearly put good time and effort into making it instructive and interesting. This is more of a suggestion to look beyond Mahout. It's not currently getting the kind of traction it would if it were more user friendly.

As it stands, the Mahout user experience is kinda choppy, and doesn't really give you a clear idea of how to develop and update intelligent systems and their life cycles, IMO. Mahout is not really acceptable for academics either, they are more likely to use Matlab or R. In the Mahout docs, the random forest implementation barely works and the docs have erroneous examples, etc... Thats frustrating, and the parallelism and scalability of the Mahout routines depend on the algorithm. I don't currently see Mahout going anywhere solid as it stands, again IMO. I hope I'm wrong!

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