I was thinking about getting this on Amazon, but all of the reviews look suspiciously fake. All of the reviewers have only reviewed this book, and one has only reviewed packt publishing books. And all of the reviews are from a 3 week period(a few months after the book's release).
Clicking through Paul Irish's post to the original from mrdoob, and reading the comments, it seems to me that David Barnes from Packt responded in a pretty open and forthright way.
In the interest of full disclosure; before I begin, I would like to make it known that I am an employee of Packt Publishing.
However, with regard msoad's comment, I would like to make it known that this was a mistake. We do give a royalty to Open Source projects that we publish on, as well as to our authors.
You can find full details on this project on our website here: http://www.packtpub.com/open-source
Also, whilst we may provide copies of books for reviewing, we never create or fake any reviews, views are the reviewers own.
We would like to apologize for any confusion or concern any of this may have caused.
Currently I am reading this book in Safari Books Online and it looks excellent. I was not a fan of PacktPub but Lately they are releasing excellent books like Mastering Web development with AngularJS and Learning IPython for interactive computing besides this Machine Learning book. The only grunge against this book is it used Iris database for its "Hello World" and some how i could not wrap around that data, rest seems to be approachable to me (Disclaimer: I have not completed the book).
In my experience, the Packt books have always felt as though they have had very little editing and review (things you'd never see in a technical book from e.g. Addison Wesley or Prentice Hall). So if the book seems great it's probably due mostly to the author (which is fine with me if the book is cheap).
Looking at the table of contents, it seems the approach is deeper than O'Reilly's Collective Intelligence. I'm thinking about buying it, for Chapter 12 alone.
When you read that, can you tell us what is was like?
