Basics of Machine Learning
If you want to get into machine learning, it is actually pretty easy, provided you studied Math, Engineering, or Science in University. The papers are hard at first, but they don't hide like other papers do. Everything is laid out there for you to code and run with your own data. In a field like, say, Structural Engineering, the paper writers can make claims about the structural resilience of an Ultra High Performance Concrete that they tested, without you <i>ever</i> being able to hope to repeat the exact experiment. You may not even be able to get your hands on the proprietary compound they used.<p>In ML, you might not be able to use the same corpus / training set, but you're usually able to recode the actual algorithm and you're usually able to find a compatible type of data set to work off of.<p>Also, most ML people are lazy, so if they don't work for Google or Facebook they're usually using open data datasets anyway, which are trivial to drop in and verify.