the 2 books on amazon's Bought This Item Also Bought" blurb are more rigorous, and quite useful books, also covering topics like Lucene/SOLR with full java code listsings:

Algorithms of the Intelligent Web by H. Marmanis

Collective Intelligence in Action by Satnam Alag

I agree, this was the eye opener for me. When it comes to data mining, I'll take practise over theory any day.

Diving directly into actual code samples, and a large plus for using Python, this book is one of the few I actually keep on my desk.