I appreciate the second perspective.

This book was recommended to me by a friend (who is a genius and great at ML), and I've just begun reading it.

My problem with MOOC is that I strongly dislike the audio/video format. I love textbooks. I learned a lot of what I know about computer science from books, not lectures. I went through many of Tanenbaum's thoughout high school -- and was more addicted to his textbooks than many of the novels that I read at the time.

I would really like to get some recommendations on some good _textual_ ML material.