Modern web application hype revolves around a rich UI experience. A lesser-known aspect of modern applications is the use of techniques that enable the intelligent processing of information and add value that can't be delivered by other means. Examples of success stories based on these techniques abound, and include household names such as Google, Netflix, and Amazon. This book describes how to build the algorithms that form the core of intelligence in these applications.
The book covers five important categories of algorithms: search, recommendations, groupings, classification, and the combination of classifiers. A separate book could be written on each of these topics, and clearly exhaustive coverage isn't a goal of this book. This book is an introduction to the fundamentals of these five topics. It's an attempt to present the basic algorithms of intelligent applications rather than an attempt to cover completely all algorithms of computational intelligence. The book is written for the widest audience possible and relies on a minimum of prerequisite knowledge.