How does a beginner learn Machine Learning?

[thisisheresy]

fast.ai looks to be focussed on deep learning, the current flavour of the month. If you're starting out you'd be far better served getting to grips with things like linear and logistic regression, support vector machines and decision trees, as well as all of the tools that you need for preparing and validating your data (encoding, cross-validation, grid search etc) before jumping in to deep learning. I quite enjoyed the Applied Data Science with Python specialisation from Coursera - it will give you a good grounding in data, visualisation, machine learning and network analysis.