I did Stanford's online ML course (taught by Andrew Ng, quoted in the article), and heartily recommend it. I found it to be a nice balance of theory and practic

I did Stanford's online ML course (taught by Andrew Ng, quoted in the article), and heartily recommend it. I found it to be a nice balance of theory and practice - it's also not a bad way to learn Octave (the GNU equivalent of matlab) if one wants to do that. http://online.stanford.edu/course/machine-learning http://online.stanford.edu/course/machine-learning (I don't know if there's a way to just access the materials and videos though, rather than signing up for the course.)