In my opinion this is a great book to get you up and running with machine learning. It manages to not only cover the basics but also talks about some of the more advanced topics. There are a couple of things that I really liked about this book. 1. You learn a lot of things that you can't find online and that are APPLICABLE to the real world. Even if you just want to get into machine learning and use it but don't necessarily want to become a data scientist this is a great buy. Machine Learning can be really useful when put into good use. I for example, after reading the book, was able to quickly write up a python program to predict what time I would wake up based on what time I slept, what day it was etc. As well as having tons of fun playing with data from http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/ . 2. Although this book is focusing on python the math that you need to implement the algorithms are all there. What's great about that is that I was able to "Translate" most of the examples from the book to C++ code without much hustle. Not only that but the math behind these algorithms made a lot more sense after reading this book. So even if you don't necessarily want to use python but want to gain intuition over how these algorithms work this book will also come in handy. 3. This book isn't just about Machine Learning algorithms. It actually talks quite a bit about preparing and getting good data in general. Which is crucial for every data scientist since almost 80% of your job is getting good data. And another 20% finding a good model and training it. Overall I would say that this book helped me and that I learnt a bunch of new things. If the above didn't convince you (Along with other reviews) here are some small details that made the reading of this book a joyful experience. - I felt that reading the book was actually really fun and motivating since at every chapter there were several examples of applying the theory taught. Which motivated me to move on and read more. - Although this may not seem as important. I have to say that the font of the book as well as the tone of the writing made the reading of the book really comfortable and joyful. I didn't feel that I was getting tired and was easy for me to pick it up where I left off. I have to say though that there where some typos here and there (I thing I found 2-3 in total as well as 2 pictures where swapped) but they were easy to spot so it wasn't that big of a problem. Reasons why you shouldn't buy this book: Unless you are a Machine Learning expert and you look into the deeper insights and more advanced stuff in Machine Learning you shouldn't be looking into buying this book since most of the stuff taught is already known to you. (Although I doubt that you would be looking through this reviews thinking whether to buy it or not in this case). I have also included some pictures. Great Book. Highly Recommend it!