Ask HN: Best books on AI?

Hofstader's Gödel, Escher, Bach is a classic too

Godel, Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

the diamond age

starting with something like "AI: A modern approach" he a better start?

AI: A Modern Approach (Russell, Norvig)

AI: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig.

Though it is an academic book, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig.

the first year PHD course book for good theory is Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Bishop

Bishop's book is a great way to start getting into machine learning

Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning is a good start

Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

I really appreciate the style of the Goodfellow book, it's very approachable.

Deep Learning (Goodfellow, Bengio)

Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio.

PAIP is awesome.

PAIP is also very, very high on my list as well.

PAIP is one of most elegant and timeless books for both programming and old school AI.

PAIP is one of my favorite books ever

I love Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence by Peter Norvig

Some on this thread have recommended Norvig's PAIP

One of the best books on AI and Programming ever.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

The book is interesting, but the level of detail he goes into in some of his speculation is completely unjustified.

There is lots of content in this book but there is no practical technical content in this book. Interesting philosophy.

Superintelligence by nick bostrom. It's a book that explores how superintelligence could emerge

The Master Algorithm: made for a general audience, gives you a lay of the land

I've got a book called "Game Programming Patterns" by Robert Nystrom which goes into this. It's not advanced, but it's very good.

It's a good book for learning about symbolic AI.

Use the book by Sutton and Barto, the new edition:

Sutton & Barto's Reinforment Learning

This is really not the case for Sutton and Barto, "RL: An Introduction"

Murphy's MLAPP provides additional useful material and is well written.