If asked for a list of books which give a basic overview of the things I do as a coder, I usually suggest Microserfs, Hackers and Painters and maybe something like The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Now though, I think I’ll add The Numerati to that list. It isn’t that my work makes me one of the Numerati but it does give a view of how the world is changing and what sorts of things computer systems will be handing in the future.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit. My only quibble was the lack of real meat in the discussion about the math and the systems but it’s understandable since this was a book for the mainstream not geeks like me.

The ability to take large amounts of data and analyze it would seem to be something only companies would be able to do but I think individuals can do their own now. You could use the combination of EC2, Hadoop and Mahout and become a Numerati yourself.

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