Machine Learning

One book that I would suggest to anyone is Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation - HMU. It is very approachable and presents some very interesting topics (so you won't write a regex for matching HTML and will learn what P vs NP means). On a more practical side, I think that a must read for machine learning is Tom Mitchell - Machine Learning . Another book that from what I've heard is easier to digest is Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques.

This is kind of moot, truthfully I'd go, now (or look first at, but they're both getting praise so...) for Chris Bishop or Ethem Alpaydin's new books. But between Norvig and Mitchell, Norvig has 138 pages on learning vs Mitchell's ~390, but, Mitchell's is from a different era, Norvig is easier to read - larger pages, more diagrams, better writing, and you know where you are better - and fresher material. To each his own. But like I say, I'd probably go with one of the even newer ones. For a while Mitchell was all there was, then Norvig came along, and now there're a few to choose from.

If you can read and understand Mitchell's book, you will have a very good foundation for understanding modern ML techniques. The poster was looking for references to introduce him to the field.

I agree on the Mitchell book. If you are looking for a light introduction to naive Bayesian text classification then there's always the piece I wrote for DDJ: http://www.ddj.com/development-tools/184406064 John.

books about machine learning applications/tools: - "Programming Collective Intelligence" - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/ - "Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Technique" - http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/book.html books about machine learning background/theory: - "machine learning" - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html - "learning and soft computing" - http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/view?isbn=0262112558 For a simple-to-use (Python-based) machine learning tool/API check out Orange: http://magix.fri.uni-lj.si/orange/

Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell for a serious academic book. Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran for a practical approach in Python.