I found Christopher Bishop's book to have a good deal of knowledge in it. Plus, he compliments many ideas with graphical figures, which is a big plus. http://

I found Christopher Bishop's book to have a good deal of knowledge in it. Plus, he compliments many ideas with graphical figures, which is a big plus. http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-Learning-Information-Statistics/dp/0387310738 http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-Learning-Informati... Also, if you needed more information about optimization methods all of Stephen Boyd's books are really good, just check out his entire website for information. http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/ http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/