Reddit reviews Introduction to Data Mining

This book has a pretty accessible treatment of clustering algorithms:

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Data-Mining-Pang-Ning-Tan/dp/0321321367/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1374671320&sr=8-7&keywords=data+mining

Of course, we can't forget the almighty ESLII (this one's free if you don't need a hardcopy): http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/

In terms of AI, I used this text for one of my AI/machine learning topics. Would recommend Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Approach

Some other suggested readings from that topic:

Introduction Data Mining

Artificial Intelligence

From my experience this is an excellent book and I'm eagerly awaiting the second edition--which comes out in Feb 2017? :(

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Data-Mining-Pang-Ning-Tan/dp/0321321367

Correct. I felt this would be a fairly accessible recent example of data mining I could reference for sake of brevity, rather than going into detail on classification and prediction algorithms. The Target story was close enough to examples in the Introduction to Data Mining textbook we used at my University.