Books by author: Toby Segaran

This book presents an overview of several machine learning techniques that are very useful for creating intelligent systems. It presents "working code" in Python accompanied by fairly superficial explanations of how the algorithms work. It is clearly intended as a cookbook rather than a rigorous introduction to the subject.

That said, I'm impressed with how quick and easy it is to get some initial results with these algorithms in Python, even if the implementations presented here are not robust and won't scale well. This is no substitute for a book like Duda & Hart's Pattern Classification, but it's a reasonable way to whet your appetite.