Cool cover, no?
I wish the book was as fun, but I will admit I’m not an unbiased party. In finding the amazon listing for the CBR link I read a review that complained that it was a victim of the Freakonomics trend, books that want to make typically staid topics irreverent and funny, and I actually wished it was more Malcolm Gladwell-y. It’s the second book I’ve read on big data recently that I’ve hoped was going to be like the excellent Dataclysm and been disappointed. That book actually extracted social truths out of aggregated data (mostly from the author’s own OK Cupid), this one just seemed to be a tutorial on n-grams.
The examples the authors give are entertaining enough but don’t really illustrate a larger point, and they come fast enough that I found myself backtracking to read back what the chapter was trying to prove.
I also felt like a lot of the information here was pretty basic and just gussied up with business school terminology. That seems to be true of a lot of the post-Gladwell post-freakonomics social science books; a little too impressed by their own ideas.
In any case, i think this may have been a good book if it’s what you were looking for, but as I was in the mood for something entirely different I’m a bad judge. In closing, check out Dataclysm. https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-When-Think-Ones-Looking/dp/0385347375/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=9OJJ9ZWCFGZ1&keywords=dataclysm&qid=1554660991&s=gateway&sprefix=datac&sr=8-1