I found Machine Learning for Hackers to be good as a practical, case study based book for learning to apply and understand what is going on in several machine l

I found Machine Learning for Hackers to be good as a practical, case study based book for learning to apply and understand what is going on in several machine learning problems. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018483.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018483.do http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-for-Hackers-ebook/dp/B007A0BNP4/ http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-for-Hackers-ebook/dp/... It's definitely a practical approach. There's a lot of explanation but, despite coming from two PhD candidates, it certainly did not read like an academic paper. It's also case study based, not necessarily algorithm based. As a bonus, I used that book to teach myself R. I don't think it's meant to be an intro to R tutorial, but it worked for me. All three are positives in my book.