Good introduction to pattern recognition (Score 2, Informative)

I came across this book browsing through Safari Books Online's titles, and was almost halfway through the book before I was able to get hold of an actual copy. While the main focus of the book is on data mining (definitely not only recommendation algorithms, it also shows how Google's PageRank algorithm works, how to mine user data from Facebook and write matching algorithms etc.) it provides a good introduction to pattern recognition in general. It shows you how to write a simple neural network in Python, how to write a Bayes classifier for spam filtering, and even touches on Support Vector Machines (SVMs). What I really love about the book is that everything is explained by means of code examples, with the actual math theory in an appendix for those of us more mathematically inclined. You can literally sit with the book next to the computer and reproduce the code as you go along.