For those wanting to get started (or further) in machine learning, I highly recommend the article, "A Few Useful Things to Know About Machine Learning," by Pedr

For those wanting to get started (or further) in machine learning, I highly recommend the article, "A Few Useful Things to Know About Machine Learning," by Pedro Domingos (a well respected ML researcher): http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/cacm12.pdf http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/cacm12.pdf. It's written in a very accessible style (almost no math); contains a wealth of practical information that everyone in the field "knows", but no one ever bothered to write down in one place, until now; and suggests the best approaches to use for a variety of common problems. As someone who uses machine learning heavily in my own research, a lot of this seemed like "common sense" to me when I read it, but on reflection I realized that this is precisely the stuff that is most valuable and hardest to find in existing papers and blog posts.