Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings
Authors Amy N. Langville & Carl D. Meyer did a fabulous job with this book. Their writing allows you to actually visualize something that is extremely mathematical and complex, not an easy thing to do. It also incorporates illustrations that go along with the text and algorithms to make it easy to understand. This book gets into the nitty gritty of page rank from crawling and indexing methods to the algorithms used to figure out page rank. Now I will admit that the the algorithms were a bit confusing for myself but if you just read through the mathematics of it this book it is still very informative. The book caters to two very different audiences from one angle it covers the curious science reader and the technical side of page rank. For those of you mathematicians it covers your intellectual interests allowing you to explore mathematically how exactly everything fits together.
Amy N. Langville is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. Carl D. Meyer is the Professor of Mathematics at North Carolina State University. He is the author of Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra. Langville and Meyer have other documents about page rank and search engines such as, Deeper Inside PageRank, The Use of Linear Algebra by Web Search Engines, Updating PageRank with Iterative Aggregation, etc.
I wouldn’t recommend this book for employers to give their link marketers right out of the shoot. I would give them the option to read it once they’ve had some experience and become truly interested in how page rank works. The first 4 chapters are a good read as a business owner trying to get a general understanding of pagerank without getting too deep into the algorithms.