[aelaguiz]

Thanks for the information! I've updated the article to reflect this.

Here's a question: where does "the field" hang out? Is there a cohesive community of any sort?

[danger]

I'd say the closest thing to a cohesive community would be the MetaOptimize Q&A forum, but maybe others have other suggestions:

http://metaoptimize.com/qa

[gammarator]

The Kaggle forums can be a good resource, and competing there is a good way to polish your skills.

Also, you might check out Random Forest algorithms--they're high performance but still very beginner friendly, as there aren't many parameters to tune. There's a nice implementation in the excellent scikits-learn python library.