I really enjoyed the books "Learning From Data"[1], and "Programming Collective Intelligence"[2]. Both are accessible to beginners. Learning From Data gives a

I really enjoyed the books "Learning From Data"[1], and "Programming Collective Intelligence"[2]. Both are accessible to beginners. Learning From Data gives a more theoretical introduction to machine learning. One of the central ideas from the book that I still think about often is that machine learning is merely function approximation. There exists a function which will drive a car perfectly, but we don't know what that function is, so we try to approximate that function with machine learning. Programming Collective Intelligence is a more hands-on introduction to machine learning. The book has examples in Python, but I believe the Python code is low quality. Ignoring the example code (and I did ignore it), the book is a very enjoyable introduction to many different machine learning algorithms. If you don't know the difference between linear regression, nearest-neighbors clustering, support vector machines, and a neural networks, this book will explain how each of these work and give a good intuition about when to use each. [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1600490069 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1600490069 [2] http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Building-Applications/dp/0596529325 http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...