On Writing Our Book: A Little Philosophy

We recently got this question from a subscriber to our book:

… will you in any way describe what subject areas, backgrounds, courses etc. would help a non data scientist prepare themselves to at least understand at a deeper level why they techniques you will discuss work…and also understand the boundary conditions and limits of the models etc….. ?

[…] I would love to understand what I could review first to better prepare to extract the most from it.

It’s a good question, and it raises an interesting philosophical point. To read our book, it will of course help to know a little bit about statistics and probability, and to be familiar with R and/or with programming in general. But we do plan on introducing the necessary concepts as needed into our discussion, so we don’t consider these subjects to be “pre-requisites” in a strict sense.

Part of our reason for writing this book is to make reading about statistics/probability and machine learning easier. That is, we hope that if you read our book, other reference books and textbooks will make more sense, because we have given you a concrete context for the abstract concepts that the reference books cover.

So, my advice to our subscriber was to keep his references handy as he read our book, rather than trying to brush up on all the “pre-requisite” subjects first.

Of course, everyone learns differently, and we’d like to know what other readers think. What (if anything) would you consider “pre-requisites” to our book? What would you consider good companion references?

If you are subscribed to our book, please join the conversation, or post other comments on the Practical Data Science with R author’s forum. Your input will help us write a better book; we look forward to hearing from you.

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