A pre-requisite to be a Data Scientist

So what should be in the toolkit of people who call themselves a data scientist?

A fundamental skill is the ability to manipulate data. A data scientist should be familiar and comfortable with a number of platforms and scripting tools to get the job done. What is difficult in Excel might be trivial in R. And when R struggles, you should switch to Unix (or use a programming language such as Python) get that portion of the data munging done. Along the way, you pick up a lot of tips and tricks. For example: how to read a big datafile in R?

The goal is to get the job done. Familiarity with a wide variety of tools, and expertise in some is the hallmark of any good would-be data scientist.

O'Reilly's Data Science Kit - Books

It is not as if I don't have enough books (and material on the web) to read. But this list compiled by the O'Reilly team should make any data analyst salivate.

http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/data-science-kit.do

The Books and Video included in the set are:

1. Data Analysis with Open Source Tools
2. Designing Data Visualizations
3. An Introduction to Machine Learning with Web Data (Video)
4. Beautiful Data
5. Think Stats
6. R Cookbook
7. R in a Nutshell
8. Programming Collective Intelligence