Tangential: for anyone reading the PDF,

  pdfcrop --verbose --margins "20 30 20 30" --bbox "110 180 440 740" casi.pdf

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/en/man1/pdfcrop....

For those who know, How does this book differ from Foundations of Data Science by Blum/Hopcroft/Kannan ?

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/jeh/book%20June%2014,%202017pdf.pd... ?

Statistician/data scientist here. This is one of my favorite texts in the area. It frames and groups methods historical rather than mathematically. I've found it both a valuable teaching tool and an interesting read on its own. Highly recommended.

Another amazing book from Hastie/Efron. The ISLR book was my first foray into ML and landed me my current job. Will be sure to devour this one as well!

How do you approach a publisher with the free PDF model? Is it something they're generally open to? (e.g. you have a corpus of work on a website that you want to turn into a book)

How much math must one know to be able to read this book? Is this an introductory book?

direct link to pdf, https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/CASI_files/PDF/casi.pdf

Awesome! I love the recent trend of making these books freely available.

Efron is the creator of bootstrap.

Hastie iirc is one of the two responsible for LASSO, Ridge, and I think elasticnet.

I can really recommend this book. It's an enjoyable read and is very pragmatic. A useful reference for practitioners.

Now let's hope that we can start using these methods more in science instead of e.g. p-values.