Any recommendations for beginner materials about this and other modeling and machine learning topics? I worked for a few years with the folks behind SciPy and N

Any recommendations for beginner materials about this and other modeling and machine learning topics? I worked for a few years with the folks behind SciPy and NumPy and iPython, and helped package the suite of tools many use for this kind of work, and so I have quite a bit of familiarity with the tools for experimenting with this stuff, but I never dug into the math and I'm not even sure where to start on it.