Statistics for hackers?
lliiffee: One of the things EoSL emphasizes is that simple methods can often give very good results.  If you have been through the first few chapters of the book, you should be able to do some cool stuff with nearest neighbors or linear classifiers.  (The reality is that on most problems, fancy methods give a slight increase over simple, especially when they are implemented by someone really skilled at getting good performance out of simple methods.)Nearest neighbors methods can be implemented in something like 3 lines, so you have no excuse!