Top Data Science Books

Top Data Science Books

Best Books

Top Data Sci + ML Books

Massive pile of books in a warehouse with a computer

Data Science and Machine Learning can be overwhelming! Gain stability navigating through this ever-changing landscape with the following recommended reads.

+Please add other book suggestions below in the comments.

#1 Automating Inequality: How High Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks

 

#2 Natural Language Processing with Transformers by Lewis Tunstall, Leandro von Werra & Thomas Wolf

#3 Deep Learning with Python by François Chollet

#4 Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan

#5 Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil

#6 Generative Deep learning by David Foster

#7 The Pattern On The Stone by W. Daniel Hillis

#8 The Book of Why by Dana Mackenzie and Judea Pearl

#9 Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

#10 Practical Statistics for Data Scientists by Peter Bruce, Andrew Bruce & Peter Gedeck

#11 Python for Data Analysis by Wes McKinney

#12 Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble

#13 Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras and Tensorflow

#14 Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows

#15 The Manga Guide to Regression Analysis by Shin Takahashi

#16 Data Visualisation (2nd Edition) by Andy Krik

#17 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

#18 Interactive Data Visualization for the Web by Scott Murray

#19 The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

#21 Resisting AI by Dan McQuillan

#22 Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiavernini

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100 Data Science Quotes

100 Data Science Quotes

Best Quotes

100 Data Science Quotes

Enjoy these curated quotes that diverge from the usual and offer a fresh perspective on data science and its incredible impact on our modern world.

+Please add any quote suggestion below in the comments.

#1 The road to total tech-surveillance is paved with convenience. — Dr. Abeba Birhane

#2 Pro tip: if a machine learned model scores 100% on something, the metric is wrong, or the evaluation dataset is not robust, or the evaluation dataset is in the training data, or a combination of all of the above. At least in this point in time. – Dr. Margaret Mitchell

#3 Learning how to do data science is like learning to ski. You have to do it. – Claudia Perlich

#4 Analytics is 50% math and 50% communication. If a person cannot express their ideas in written or presentation format, it doesn’t matter if they can do the math. – Mia Umanos

#5 Our ability to do great things with data will make a real difference in every aspect of our lives. – Jennifer Pahlka

#6 Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in. – Alan Alda

#7 Bias can never be fully solved as an engineering problem. Bias is a systemic problem. – Dr. Irene Solaiman

#8 Talented data scientists leverage data that everybody sees; visionary data scientists leverage data that nobody sees. – Vincent Granville

#9 Though we do need more women to graduate with technical degrees, I always like to remind women that you don’t need to have science or technology degrees to build a career in tech. – Susan Wojcicki

#10 People’s lives are at stake, but not because of some super intelligent system … but because of an overreliance on technical systems. The harms are real, and that they are present. – Dr. Joy Buolamwini

#11 The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning…. Data–driven predictions can succeed―and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves. – Nate Silver

#12 I had not realized that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.  – Joseph Weizenbaum (creator of the first chatbot, ELIZA)

#13 Has anyone else noticed that the term “big data” is no longer as buzz-word-worthy as before? Definitely our data hasn’t gotten any smaller but I wonder what kind of (pragmatic?) process happened here. – Lucy Li

#14 The best way to learn data science is to do data science. – Chanin Nantasenamat

#15 Torture the data, and it will confess to anything – Ronald Coase

#16 Data is the new oil. – Clive Humby

#17 Maybe stories are just data with a soul. – Brené Brown

#18 Data is a tool for enhancing intuition. – Hilary Mason

#19 The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. – Neil deGrasse Tyson

#20 If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. – Albert Einstein

#21 Trust in yourself, believe that your voice matters, and know that your words are good enough. – Amber Gordon

#22 I didn’t want to just know the names of things. I remember really wanting to know how it all worked. – Elizabeth Blackburn

#23 In computing, we need to have pride not about how much we can gatekeep others out, but how much we can educate and bridge beyond the default audience. – Lucy Li

#24 Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will be either lucky or wrong. – Suhail Doshi

#25 All models are wrong, but some are useful. – George Box

#26 Data is the new oil. – Clive Humby

#27 It’s easy to lie with statistics. It’s hard, to tell the truth without statistics. – Andrejs Dunkels

#28 Gentlemen, you need to put the armor plate where the bullet holes aren’t because that’s where the holes were on the planes that didn’t return. – Abraham Wald

#29 Certain people – men, of course – discouraged me, saying [science] was not a good career for women. That pushed me even more to persevere. – Francoise Barre

#30 I think it’s very important to get more women into computing. My slogan is: Computing is too important to be left to men. – Karen Spärck Jones 

#31 Let the dataset change your mindset. – Hans Rosling

#32 There is no such thing as “AI on its own” there is ALWAYS people behind AI. from those who clean and label data, give continuous feedback to models, to those who write code, AI is people through and through. no people, no AI. definitely NO such thing as uncontrolled AI – Dr. Abeba Birhane

#33 Two things always score points with me: 1) Folks who demonstrate curiosity 2) Folks who can explain their process behind a decision–understanding someone’s thought process is valuable to me. – Omar Sultan

#34 Lies, damned lies, and statistics. –Mark Twain

#35 Data scientist: The person who is better at explaining the business implications of analytical results than any scientist and better at the analytical science than any MBA. – Dr. Jennifer Priestley

#36 It’s a basic, intuitive right, worthy of enshrinement: Citizens, not the corporations that stealthily track them, should own their own data. – Franklin Foer

#37 Above all else, show the data. – Edward R. Tufte

#38 Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world. – Colin Powell

#39 The great thing about predictions is that you can be wrong. – Chris Wiggins

#40 Rather than meet societal obligations to invest in education and physical and mental care, AI’s advocates risk creating a two-tier system where artificial facsimiles will be deemed good enough for those without means—but the well-to-do will hire actual humans. – Emily Bender & Alex Hanna

#41 It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. – Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)

#42 Data isn’t information; information isn’t knowledge; knowledge isn’t wisdom. – Ian Lowe

#43 Data scientists are kind of like the new Renaissance folks, because data science is inherently multidisciplinary. – John Foreman

#44 Destroy your money, you can earn more. Destroy your data, your existence is erased. – Kurt Seapoint

#45 On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves. – Nate Silver

#46 The data fabric is the next middleware. – Todd Papaioannou

#47 1) Don’t ban books 2) Don’t waste educators’ time with book bans 3) Don’t make decisions about books without reading them 4) Don’t fall for OpenAI’s interface: ChatGPT is not the kind of thing you can sensibly ask for information. – Dr. Emily Bender

#48 Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life. – Marcus Aurelius 

#49 There’s something so beautiful, so innately human about struggling to solve a problem. The idea in the shower, a conclusion in your dream, the solution at dinner. – Britney Muller

#50 What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions. – John Green

#51 In the space where people are discussing artificial intelligence, the folks who have come out earliest and with the most grounded and materially-specific concerns have generally been women, particularly Black women and women of color. – Meridith Wittaker

#52 An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. – Neils Bohr 

#53 Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler. – Albert Einstein

#54 The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know. – Isaac Newton

#55 Science is a way of thinking, not just a body of knowledge. – Carl Sagan

#56 In Data Science if you want to help individuals, be empathetic and ask questions; that way, you can begin to understand their journey, too. – Damian Duffy Mingle

#57 PSA: safety and ethics research makes AI work Better! It doesn’t slow progress! It is progress! Pass it along. – Dr. Irene Solaiman

#58 We need more interdisciplinary education. We need liberal arts. We need mandatory and MEANINGFUL ethics courses for scientists and technologists. – Savannah Thais

#59 Aim for simplicity in Data Science. Real creativity won’t make things more complex. Instead, it will simplify them – Damian Duffy Mingle

#60 If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology — and you don’t understand your problems. Laurie Anderson

#61 Contact data ages like fish not wine…it gets worse as it gets older, not better. – Gregg Thaler

#62 Data is like garbage. You’d better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it. – Mark Twain

#63 As data scientists, our job is to extract signal from noise. – Daniel Tunkelang

#64 If you wanna do data science, learn how it is a technical, cultural, economic, and social discipline that has the ability to consolidate and rearrange societal power structures. – Hugo Bowne–Anderson

#65 Without a systematic way to start and keep data clean, bad data will happen. – Donato Diorio

#66 Possessed is the right word. I often tell people; I don’t necessarily want to be a data scientist. You just kind of are a data scientist. You just can’t help but look at that data set and go, I feel like I need to look deeper. I feel like that’s not the right fit. – Jennifer Shin

#67 Data science is all about asking interesting questions based on the data you have–or often the data you don’t have. – Sarah Jarvis

#68 The core advantage of data is that it tells you something about the world that you didn’t know before. – Hilary Mason

#69 Nobody ever talks about motivation in learning. Data science is a broad and fuzzy field, which makes it hard to learn. Really hard. Without motivation, you’ll end up stopping halfway through and believing you can’t do it, when the fault isn’t with you―it’s with the teaching. Take control of your learning by tailoring it to what you want to do, not the other way around. – Vik Paruchuri

#70 Data levels all arguments. – Anthony W. Richardson

#71 Hiding within those mounds of data is the knowledge that could change the life of a patient, or change the world. – Atul Butte

#72 Although data can make a compelling case for something, data rarely create the emotions needed to spur people into action. – John Maeda

#73 Being a data scientist is not only about data crunching. It’s about understanding the business challenge, creating some valuable actionable insights to the data, and communicating their findings to the business. – Jean–Paul Isson

#74 Listening to the data is important… but so is experience and intuition. After all, what is intuition at its best but large amounts of data of all kinds filtered through a human brain rather than a math model? – Steve Lohr

#75 The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see. – John Tukey

#76 The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight. – Carly Fiorina

#77 Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data. – John Naisbitt

#78 Theories come and go, but fundamental data always remain the same. – Mary Leakey

#79 The difference between a great [data scientist] and a good one is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. – Thomas C. Redman

#80 Every company has big data in its future and every company will eventually be in the data business. – Thomas H Davenport

#81 You have got to have a combination of machine intelligence and human insight to do big data well. – Ray Eitel–Porter

#82 Some of the best theorizing comes after collecting data because then you become aware of another reality. – Robert J Shiller

#83 There is no such thing as an “unbiased” or “debiased” dataset. Stop presenting like that’s a real thing. It’s really frigging destructive to legitimate academic debate on bias in ML. – Dr. Margaret Mitchell

#84 We have to learn to interrogate our data collection process, not just our algorithms. – Cathy O’Neil

#85 Big data isn’t about bits, it’s about talent. – Douglas Merrill

#86 Knowledge is some compilation of data that allows you to make decisions, and what we find today is that computers are making a lot of decisions automatically. – Yann LeCun

#87 The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge. – Thomas Berger

#88 Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. – Immanuel Kant 

#89 Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. – Marie Curie 

#90 The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions. – Claude Levi–Strauss

#91 No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. – Albert Einstein

#92 Science is the poetry of reality. – Richard Dawkins

#93 Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. – Stephen Hawking 

#94 Exploration is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s what scientists do every day. If a scientist already knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t be discovering anything, because they already knew what they were doing. – Neil deGrasse Tyson

#95 The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. – Stephen Hawking

#96 Science is the bridge that connects our dreams with reality, and empowers us to shape the future we envision. – Michio Kaku

#97 Science is not limited to laboratories and equations; it is a way of seeing and understanding the world, and its wonders are accessible to all. – Rachel Carson

#98 Science is the language in which we converse with nature, and its truths are revealed through the language of evidence. – Mary Anning

#99 The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. – Richard Dawkins

#100 Science is magic that works. – Kurt Vonnegut

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