You want to read either Elements of Statistical Learning (2nd ed.) OR Kevin Murphy's ML book for the theory. Then you will want to consult a text book in your

You want to read either Elements of Statistical Learning (2nd ed.) OR Kevin Murphy's ML book for the theory. Then you will want to consult a text book in your work domain (e.g. introduction to speech & language OR statistical natural language processing for the domain of natural language processing). And finally, you will want either a book, or free online Web resources/tutorial videos that show you how to do things in practice, given a particular programming language and tool-set (e.g. Python + TensorFlow, Java + DeepLearing4J). This recipe of Theory + Application + Practice/Tools should get you there.