Reddit reviews Python Machine Learning

Well I do web-development right now but have been teaching myself Machine-Learning. I would eventually like to venture and do more theoretical work so I will tell you what classes I've taken and what I've found important to learn so far.

Andre Ng's Machine-learning class is excellent, I don't know Matlab and started to fall short in the assignments because I didn't have the time to learn Matlab along with the theoretical learning but it will give you a good base of knowledge on how many of the deep learning techniques work. https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

I would also highly recommend http://www.amazon.com/Python-Machine-Learning-Sebastian-Raschka-ebook/dp/B00YSILNL0 .

On to the things I find really important to learn

If you plan to do Deep Learning, having at least a basic understanding of Linear Algebra is a must. Linear Algebra I think was much easier to learn than Calculus though!

I think if you really want to start delving into modern AI you'll need to learn to read papers. My level is increasing but a lot of the new papers are still pretty far out of my reach of understanding. This is a huge topic and could spend the rest of your life understanding everything in every paper now a days but some of the major areas to get good at:

1. Mathematical Analysis I think is very important. You may not need this for a lot of Deep Learning papers unless they are heavy in probability but if you ever wanted to learn about other types of AI it is pretty imperative.
   
2. Probability is a must, every interesting paper I've read other than optimization papers are Probability heavy. Think of AlphaGo's win, it used Monte Carlo Tree Search with a Markov Decision Train. Both are from probability theory.
   
3. Data structures are becoming increasingly important in a lot of non-deep learning AI ideas. Like a Godel Machine, Evolutionary Algorithms, Cellular Automata, etc... The problems with a lot of these are the data-structures make these algorithms slow. One of my favorite researchers Jurgen Schmidhuber is working on making his Godel machine work faster with something called Levsin search. The problem is, the data-structure is inherently slow as it's data-structure is it's own program.

Python ML by Sebastian Raschka

Book is recent and (working) code is all online.

Yes! The one I've used with success is Raschka's Python Machine Learning. Very hands-on, many examples, great for getting familiar with the basics of data science work, in my experience.