5 EBooks to Read Before Getting into A Machine Learning Career

Nils J. Nilsson of Stanford put these notes together in the mid 1990s. Before you turn up your nopse at the thought of learning from something from the 90s, remember that foundation is foundation, regardless of when it was written about. Sure, many important advancements have been made in machine learning since this was put together, as Nilsson himself says, but these notes cover much of what is still considered relevant elementary material in a straightforward and focused manner. There are no diversions related to advancements of the past few decades, which authors often want to cover tangentially even in introductory texts. There is, however, a lot of information about statistical learning, learning theory, classification, and a variety of algorithms to whet your appetite. At 200 pages, this can be read rather quickly.