As discussions had come up concerning some resources in predictions and methods I've found these texts to be pretty helpful:
"Introduction to Data Data Mining"
by Pang-ning Tan, Michael Steinbach, and Vipin Kumar
-I found this one to not be great on its own, but does an excellent job of summarizing and explain what methods do and how you might use them in a very colloquial fashion
"Data Mining Techniques"
by Gordon S Linoff and Michael J.A. Berry
-This one gets into significantly more math and technical detail. But generally identifies when numbers are significant... and importantly when they likely aren't.
I found that the two books together complimented each other greatly, one in describing methods in an easy to understand method, and the second one for getting into more mathematical detail when you actually start running the models.
