I still think Peter Norvig's "Artificial Intelligence" book plus a good book on Data Mining (someone suggested Frank and Witten above) might deliver more value

I still think Peter Norvig's "Artificial Intelligence" book plus a good book on Data Mining (someone suggested Frank and Witten above) might deliver more value than this. As Henning pointed out above , there aren't enough pages to cover even a few of the topics properly. It looks like the coverage is fairly thin and lacking in depth, and is more of a "some basic AI algorithms for the hot topic of the day" type book. I haven't seen the book yet but the table of contents makes me suspect the quality. "Support Vector Machines" for example are fairly complex beasts. The book has one section (from what I can see on the TOC) about SVMs. Norvig's AIMA is a brilliant book precisely because it lays a solid foundation for so much of AI. And it is still a very hefty book. I somehow doubt that this is of the same caliber. But hey, I could be wrong. Just a personal opinion and not to dampen anyone's enthusiasm.