Book: "Bad Data Handbook--Cleaning Up The Data So You Can Get Back To Work"

I picked up "Bad Data Handbook: Cleaning Up The Data So You Can Get Back To Work" during a recent O'Reilly ebook sale, hoping that there might be a few relevant nuggets for the work I'm doing with Bittwist. Unfortunately, the book reads as a collection of unrelated, (mostly) data-themed articles that lack depth and fail to create cohesion.

"Bad Data Handbook" brings together 19 authors to tell their favorite "bad data" stories. With such diversity, the book helps broaden the definition of bad data, citing examples of encoding problems, data bias, formatting inconsistencies, etc. However, this isn't the hands-on technical book that we usually get from O'Reilly -- think of it more like bad data war stories told at the pub. Instead of leaving with a new set of tools and skills, you're more likely to simply share a few, "oh yeah, I've dealt with that" moments.

The topic is nicely timed with the growing interest in big data, but the book falls short. Verdict? Skip this one.