There's also a newer book by Hastie (and Efron!), which I very much prefer to The Elements of Statistical Learning: Computer Age Statistical Inference. https:/

There's also a newer book by Hastie (and Efron!), which I very much prefer to The Elements of Statistical Learning: Computer Age Statistical Inference. https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/CASI_files/PDF/casi.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/CASI_files/PDF/casi.pdf It's really well motivated and, unlike ESL, discusses many different schools---including classical inference, empirical and Bayes deep learning. Without these different perspectives, newcomers often find statistics very obscure as it just looks like a bag of tricks.