Web mining aims to discover useful information and knowledge from the Web hyperlink structure, page contents, and usage data. Although Web mining uses many conventional data mining techniques, it is not purely an application of traditional data mining due to the semistructured and unstructured nature of the Web data and its heterogeneity. It has also developed many of its own algorithms and techniques.</P>

Liu has written a comprehensive text on Web data mining. Key topics of structure mining, content mining, and usage mining are covered both in breadth and in depth. His book brings together all the essential concepts and algorithms from related areas such as data mining, machine learning, and text processing to form an authoritative and coherent text. </P>

The book offers a rich blend of theory and practice, addressing seminal research ideas, as well as examining the technology from a practical point of view. It is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners interested in Web mining both as a learning text and a reference book. Lecturers can readily use it for classes on data mining, Web mining, and Web search. Additional teaching materials such as lecture slides, datasets, and implemented algorithms are available online.</P>

Bing Liu 刘兵，伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校(UIC)教授，他在爱丁堡大学获得人工智能博士学位。刘兵教授是Web挖掘研究领域的国际知名专家，在Web内容挖掘、互联网观点挖掘、数据挖掘等领域有非常高的造诣，他先后在国际著名学术期刊与重要国际学术会议(如KDD、WWW、AAAI、SIGIR、ICML、TKDE等)上发布关于数据挖掘、Web挖掘和文本挖掘论文一百多篇。刘兵教授担任过多个国际期刊的编辑，也是多个国际学术会议(如WWW、KDD与AAAI等)的程序委员会委员。更多的信息，可访问他的个人主页http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub