bishop's book is a good suggestion (i prefer hastie) for ml but you have to admit that 1. fastai is neural nets 2. bishop's book (and whoever else's) are grad

bishop's book is a good suggestion (i prefer hastie) for ml but you have to admit that 1. fastai is neural nets 2. bishop's book (and whoever else's) are grad books that require considerable mathematical training to really profit from 3. the aforementioned books don't teach anything practical! so ultimately i completely agree with the op of this thread - just jump in and read around when things don't work how you expect.