The recent explosion of interest in data science, data mining, and related disciplines has been mirrored by an explosion in book titles on these same topics. One of the best ways to decide which books could be useful for your career is to look at which books others are reading. This post details the 20 most popular titles in Amazon's Data Mining Books category as of Oct 25, 2015.
Note: KDnuggets gets absolutely no royalties from Amazon - this list is presented only to help our readers evaluate interesting books. 
1. Data Science From Scratch: First Principles with Python
by Joel Grus
4.3 out of 5 stars (33 reviews)
Paperback, $28.51
2. Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking
by Foster Provost & Tom Fawcett
4.6 out of 5 stars (120 reviews)
Paperback, $37.99
3. Hadoop: The Definitive Guide
by Tom White
4.5 out of 5 stars (22 reviews)
Paperback, $30.31
4. Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
by John W. Foreman
4.8 out of 5 stars (81 reviews)
Paperback, $27.48
5. Data Analytics Made Accessible
by Anil Maheshwari
4.8 out of 5 stars (75 reviews)
Kindle, $7.69
6. Data Science from Scratch: First Principles with Python
by Joel Grus
4.3 out of 5 stars (33 reviews)
Kindle, $23.69
7. Bayesian Methods for Hackers: Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Inference
by Cameron Davidson-Pilon
3.5 out of 5 stars (2 reviews)
Paperback, $29.99
8. Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking
by Foster Provost & Tom Fawcett
4.6 out of 5 stars (120 reviews)
Kindle, $15.18
9. The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction
by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani & Jerome Friedman
4.2 out of 5 stars (57 reviews)
Hardcover, $56.81
10. Training Kit (Exam 70-461) Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (MCSA)
by Dejan Sarka, Itzik Ben-Gan & Ron Talmage
4.1 out of 5 (144 reviews)
Paperback, $44.48
11. Hadoop: The Definitive Guide
by Tom White
4.5 out of 5 (22 reviews)
Kindle, $29.99
12. Big Data: Principles and Best Practices of Scalable Realtime Data Systems
by Nathan Marz & James Warren
4.5 out of 5 stars (18 reviews)
Paperback, $29.58
13. Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
by John W. Foreman
4.8 out of 5 stars (81 stars)
Kindle, $27.34
14. R in Action: Data Analysis and Graphics with R
by Robert Kabacoff
4.7 out of 5 stars (12 reviews)
Paperback, $41.37
15. R for Everyone: Advanced Analytics and Graphics
by Jared Lander
4.2 out of 5 stars (69 reviews)
Paperback, $27.54
16. Behind Every Good Decision: How Anyone Can Use Business Analytics to Turn Data into Profitable Insight
by Piyanka Jain & Puneet Sharma
4.9 out of 5 (18 reviews)
Audible, $17.95
17. iPhone: The Missing Manual
by David Pogue
4.6 out of 5 stars (262 reviews)
Paperback, $19.85
18. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 T-SQL Fundamentals (Developer Reference)
by Itzik Ben-Gan
4.4 out of 5 stars (74 reviews)
Kindle, $23.59
19. Mining the Social Web: Data Mining Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, GitHub, and More
by Matthew A. Russell
4.6 out of 5 stars (56 reviews)
Paperback, $31.28
20. Python Machine Learning
by Sebastian Raschka
5 out of 5 stars (8 reviews)
Kindle, $27.64
Bio: Matthew Mayo is a computer science graduate student currently working on his thesis parallelizing machine learning algorithms. He is also a student of data mining, a data enthusiast, and an aspiring machine learning scientist.
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