I really enjoyed the books &quot;Learning From Data&quot;[1], and &quot;Programming Collective Intelligence&quot;[2].<p>Both are accessible to beginners.<p>Learning From Data gives a more theoretical introduction to machine learning. One of the central ideas from the book that I still think about often is that machine learning is merely function approximation. There exists a function which will drive a car perfectly, but we don&#x27;t know what that function is, so we try to approximate that function with machine learning.<p>Programming Collective Intelligence is a more hands-on introduction to machine learning. The book has examples in Python, but I believe the Python code is low quality. Ignoring the example code (and I did ignore it), the book is a very enjoyable introduction to many different machine learning algorithms. If you don&#x27;t know the difference between linear regression, nearest-neighbors clustering, support vector machines, and a neural networks, this book will explain how each of these work and give a good intuition about when to use each.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;1600490069" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;1600490069</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Building-Applications&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0596529325" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...</a>