A few other things (sorry, not to snipe too much! :) ) -I'm skeptical of the idea of a single "standard text" in such a fast-moving field. New machine learning techniques appear constantly and are often documented…
In terms of "datedness," I would point out that the second edition is now out: This major new edition features many topics not covered in the original, including graphical models, random forests, ensemble methods, least…
Try "The Elements of Statistical Learning" by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman. Lots of math but an outstanding introduction.
A few other things (sorry, not to snipe too much! :) ) -I'm skeptical of the idea of a single "standard text" in such a fast-moving field. New machine learning techniques appear constantly and are often documented…
In terms of "datedness," I would point out that the second edition is now out: This major new edition features many topics not covered in the original, including graphical models, random forests, ensemble methods, least…
Try "The Elements of Statistical Learning" by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman. Lots of math but an outstanding introduction.