
"Data Science gets thrown around in the press like it's magic. Major retailers are predicting everything from when their customers are pregnant to when they want a new pair of Chuck Taylors. It's a brave new world where seemingly meaningless data can be transformed into valuable insight to drive smart business decisions. But how does one exactly do data science? Do you have to hire one of these priests of the dark arts, the "data scientist," to extract this gold from your data? Nope. Data science is little more than using straight-forward steps to process raw data into actionable insight. And in Data Smart, author and data scientist John Foreman will show you how that's done within the familiar environment of a spreadsheet."
Why it is cool?
Because instead of R, Gadoop, Spark, Python, whatever... it started explaining data science with excel.
The best part for me was optimization.
To be honest many books left an impression on me.
Those that I found to be most interesting are:
Paypal Wars by Eric M. Jackson
Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen
Data Smart Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight by John W. Foreman
can recommend a book Shoe dog describing a product-centric approach of Nike's founder and his belief in what he was selling. Build something you belive in and and would use yourself. If you will love it there's likely somebody else in the world you would find it irreplacable too.
"Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight":
https://www.amazon.com/Data-Smart-Science-Transform-Informat...
This will allow you to excel in Excel with data science.
"Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight" by by John W. Foreman
https://www.amazon.com/Data-Smart-Science-Transform-Informat...
This is likely the quickest way to start.