It looks to me like it's pitched approximately at third-year undergraduates who have a couple of years of a college math background, and is meant to pull them u

It looks to me like it's pitched approximately at third-year undergraduates who have a couple of years of a college math background, and is meant to pull them up to a level where they can fluently work with the more advanced concepts used in machine learning. The route for someone with no (or very little) math background is a lot longer, and I don't think this book is trying to provide it. I think that one either has to 1) bite the bullet and learn a year or two of undergrad math first, which provides the necessary foundation for this stuff, then learn this for real; or 2) be content with understanding and using machine learning at a hand-wavy level (which I am not denigrating). It might be nice to have a "hand-wavy machine learning" book around (there are certainly enough blog posts of that sort), but this isn't trying to be it.