This book provides an introduction to the broad field of recommender systems technology, as well as an overview of recent improvements. It is aimed at both graduate students or new PhDs who are starting their own research in the field and practitioners and IT experts who are looking for a starting point for
the design and implementation of real-world recommender applications. Additional advanced material can be found, for instance, in Recommender Systems Handbook (Ricci et al. 2010), which contains a comprehensive collection of contributions from leading researchers in the field.
This book is organized into two parts. In the first part, we start by summarizing the basic approaches to implementing recommender systems and discuss their individual advantages and shortcomings. In addition to describing how such systems are built, we focus on methods for evaluating the accuracy of
recommenders and examining their effect on the behavior of online customers.
The second part of the book focuses on recent developments and covers issues
such as trust in recommender systems and emerging applications based on Web
2.0 and Semantic Web technologies. Teaching material to accompany the topics
presented in this book is provided at the site http://www.recommenderbook.net/