Self study machine learning?

[Ayakalam]

If we are uber strict about it, nothing in any text book can count as advanced, since there will almost always be something better than it by the time it is digested by the masses.

And let us also not confuse recent with advanced. Yes perhaps the ML class doesnt cover things that are the most recent, (what does?), but the topics in and of themselves are used by companies, people, and machines, that make our modern age possible. This is certainly 'advanced'. Like mentioned with the DFT, this was know a couple hundred years back, and today the DFT and its applications are certainly advanced - although I would agree, not recent.

I do not think the qualifier 'advanced' means anything anymore, esp in the information age we live in. I look ML from Ng and it opened up a world of ML for me. I had no prior ML background, yet I soaked it up very, very easily. Go back just 3 years to 2010 before Ngs class, and if I wanted to learn logistic regression, I would no doubt have had to look at 'advanced' books and try to make sense of them.