Question: I've noticed an increasing number of jobs that are asking for experience with data mining and business intelligence technologies. This sounds like an incredibly broad topic but where would one go if they wanted to develop at least a partial understanding of this stuff if it were to come up in an interview?

Answer: 
A very good book with practical examples is the  

[Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0596529325) by Toby Segaran.
Go read [Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (Second Edition)](http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/book.html).
Then use [Weka](http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/index.html) on a pet project. Despite the name, this is a good book, and the Weka package has several levels of entry into the data-m... er machine-learning world.