Python for Data Science For Dummies

"Python for Data Science For Dummies" by Luca Massaron & John Paul Mueller is a very practical book on machine learning. In a real world scenario your first obstacles will be learning how to use the programming language as well as preparing data. Both topics are well covered in this book. The "learning from data" chapter contains an introduction into basic machine learning algorithms as well as ensemble learning. The book contains minor inaccuracies but I think it's a good, practical start for a novice. It doesn't include anything on neural nets however.