What an amazing book, I got it about a month ago for a self-study routine and every page of this book has been a joy. I am an undergraduate CS major with a decent amount of math experience, and for me this book is a tough but rewarding read. I constantly find myself reading the same section 2 or 3 times in a row, restling with the concepts until I can grasp some intuition of the topics bring discussed. The author is very thorough in their writing, making sure to fill in the details so you dont get left behind in the mathematical notation. The book is filled with beautiful graphs and other figures to further help the reader along in their understanding of machine learning.As a heads up, this book is heavy on the theory and light on the application, so keep that in mind when considering this book for purchase. It isn't going to give you a simple recipe to plug into R. It did however, lay out the intricacies of machine learning in a very abstract and methodical fashion, allowing the reader to gain a much deeper insight into the mechanics of the popular ML techniques than a more practical book would.