I would recommend reading Programming Collective Intelligence (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/ http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/). It features

I would recommend reading Programming Collective Intelligence (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/ http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/). It features lots of coding examples and covers lots of topics (like recommendation systems, searching and ranking, document filtering, document grouping etc.) It's way easier to start with it, than to learn statistics via pure theory.