[napolesmarble]

"The Nature of Code" is a book I've heard repeated is pretty good.

It's free to browse online if your interested:

http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-10-neural-networks/

[mirumirai]

I've gone through much of this book. It's really good, but it's definitely not a book on machine learning fundamentals - more on complexity and simulations.

That chapter however is a nice intro to neural networks, and the previous chapter is a nice intro to genetic algorithms.