The book

This is probably one of the standard intro texts into machine learning. Tom Mitchell covers most of the basic techniques in machine learning (ToC) but doesn’t cover all of them, e.g. SVMs. I got a bit of background in statistics so it was rather easy to dive into machine learning although their terminology is a mostly different from statistics.

If you don’t have a background in statistics but solid basics in calculus then it should be rather easy to understand the contents of this book. There are lots of exercises which help you to strengthen your understanding. I think it’s an ideal theoretical basis for Programming Collective Intelligence. All in all, a really nice book if you are interested in machine learning.