Few weeks ago I read somebody talking about this book (I do not remember who). I though it would be cool to read it, although I didn't want to buy it at that point. Later, when searching for books about programming in Python, I found it between the results and I though I was going to have to buy it :)

Collective Intelligence is a very nice book, fun to read and very instructive. It uses nowadays online services like del.icio.us, Netflix, Amazon, etc which makes it look very up to date and very web 2.0. It is not a book about learning to program in Python, which is exactly what I wanted. I wanted a book that used Python to do some stuff, which is different. Once you have learn a language, you look for actual code, meaningful code. And this book has it :)

Collective Intelligence means "use the knowledge of your users to make your products better", So the more users, the more information you have, the better results you can provide. But collective intelligence also applies to other fields, like open source software, financial markets, etc. You won't find this on the book, but on Internet, like the main article on Wikipedia.

Wherever you plan to develop a web based application or not, this book is still worth to read, since it would let you know how most of the current online services work and how do they use people knowledge and "intelligence" in their favor, to produce a better product for their users and customers.

I'm still on the first few chapters, but I like it and I though it would be nice to recommend it to you :)