[koffiekop]

We are currently using this book for a course at the Leiden institute for advanced computer science. It's pretty up to date.

It covers LSH, cosine similarity, Jaccard similarity as well as recommender systems applicable to the Netflix challenge and so forth.

[aquance]

I am a student highly interested in data mining, do you think that book would be a good start? What prerequisites do you think it needs?

[koffiekop]

It's a good book and the entry-level is not that high. However, you probably want to have some kind of basis in maths(algebra and stuff). Also you want to know some of the datamining terminology. But, it's free and open, so check it out. Also; the slides are very helpful.