Book excerpt: Handbook of Educational Data Mining (EDM) provides a thorough overview of the current state of knowledge in this area. The first part of the book includes nine surveys and tutorials on the principal data mining techniques that have been applied in education. The second part presents a set of 25 case studies that give a rich overview of the problems that EDM has addressed. Researchers at the Forefront of the Field Discuss Essential Topics and the Latest Advances With contributions by well-known researchers from a variety of fields, the book reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the EDM community. It brings the educational and data mining communities together, helping education experts understand what types of questions EDM can address and helping data miners understand what types of questions are important to educational design and educational decision making. Encouraging readers to integrate EDM into their research and practice, this timely handbook offers a broad, accessible treatment of essential EDM techniques and applications. It provides an excellent first step for newcomers to the EDM community and for active researchers to keep abreast of recent developments in the field.