A fair question. There are duplicates (Witten and Frank's "Data Mining", which is excellent), and some of the books he lists as favorites I would say are utter

A fair question. There are duplicates (Witten and Frank's "Data Mining", which is excellent), and some of the books he lists as favorites I would say are utter garbage. Some of them are so bad, I don't see how anybody smart could have read them and concluded they were worth reading. That said, as far as the idea of reading that many books, I don't see how it's out of line. I read a lot, but not nearly as much as a professional researcher such as Norvig would. I have several hundred CS textbooks I've either read or skimmed pretty thoroughly, and most of my favorite professors had many more which they'd read cover to cover.