For anyone doing the self-learning thing, right now there's 24 people that just started learning Stanford CS229 Machine Learning here: <a href="http://www.crunchcourse.com/class/stanford-cs229-machine-learning/2010/jan/" rel="nofollow">http://www.crunchcourse.com/class/stanford-cs229-machine-lea...</a> (disclosure: Crunch Course is my website. I just thought it might be a good resource for people taking hamilton's advice.)