The Kaggle forums can be a good resource, and competing there is a good way to polish your skills. Also, you might check out Random Forest algorithms--they're

The Kaggle forums can be a good resource, and competing there is a good way to polish your skills. Also, you might check out Random Forest algorithms--they're high performance but still very beginner friendly, as there aren't many parameters to tune. There's a nice implementation in the excellent scikits-learn python library.