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Product Description
Product Description
Today, interpreting data is a critical decision-making factor for businesses and organizations. If your job requires you to manage and analyze all kinds of data, turn to Head First Data Analysis, where you'll quickly learn how to collect and organize data, sort the distractions from the truth, find meaningful patterns, draw conclusions, predict the future, and present your findings to others.
Whether you're a product developer researching the market viability of a new product or service, a marketing manager gauging or predicting the effectiveness of a campaign, a salesperson who needs data to support product presentations, or a lone entrepreneur responsible for all of these data-intensive functions and more, the unique approach in Head First Data Analysis is by far the most efficient way to learn what you need to know to convert raw data into a vital business tool.
You'll learn how to:
- Determine which data sources to use for collecting information
- Assess data quality and distinguish signal from noise
- Build basic data models to illuminate patterns, and assimilate new information into the models
- Cope with ambiguous information
- Design experiments to test hypotheses and draw conclusions
- Use segmentation to organize your data within discrete market groups
- Visualize data distributions to reveal new relationships and persuade others
- Predict the future with sampling and probability models
- Clean your data to make it useful
- Communicate the results of your analysis to your audience
Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Data Analysis uses a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.
About the Author
Michael Milton likes books. Before his first day of high school wrestling, he checked out a stack of books on technique from the library and practiced on his not-terribly-enthusiastic little sister. Then he spent the first few minutes of tryouts kicking the butts of other newbies, until the experienced wrestlers realized how much fun it would be to kick his. Within a few months, he became a decent wrestler, but he always stayed a bit ahead of the other newbies because of those books.
His life has consisted of gleefully going through that process over and over again in completely unrelated fields. Naturally, he's a Head First fanatic.
Until recently Michael spent most of time looking at databases to help nonprofit organizations figure out how to make more money. He has a degree in philosophy from New College of Florida and one in religious ethics from Yale University. When he's not in the library or the bookstore, you can find him in-line skating, taking pictures, and brewing beer.
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Customer Reviews
I found it immediately useful, more so than several tomes that are currently weighing down my bookshelf. It is fairly light on statistics, but very practical with the examples used. (I recommend Head First Statistics as the logical companion guide to get you started understanding the most commonly used stats.)
Head First Data Analysis gives enough of a taste of data analysis to get you started, with excellent pencil and paper exercises, the absolute minimal amount of Excel and the briefest introduction to using R possible. The Excel examples are illustrative of common problems that data analysts need to solve and will be immediately useful for most people - I have been using spreadsheets to manipulate data since 1986 but I learned a few tricks which paid for the book the first time I used them. (There is a more comprehensive Excel book in the series Head First Excel: A learner's guide to spreadsheets)
The intro to R is barely enough to whet your appetite - I'd recommend searching youtube for some free video tutorials to get a better idea of how to use this fantastic open source tool (actually it is a programming language, but most users of R never need to write any code). R really is such a vital component of the data analysts toolkit that I felt obliged to remove a star (from what otherwise would have been a 5 star rating) for the scanty treatment it was given.
Overall a very readable book, practical, and the learning process is fun. Highly recommended.
The real life examples and graphics makes it stick in your head and are a refreshing change from reading just text.
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