[thebrid]

The advice you've been given so far is sound. Do the Andrew Ng Coursera course. It will give you a great introduction to key areas of machine learning. Andrew Ng is a terrific educator.

The level is pitched just right - enough maths to understand what's going on and implement it yourself - but not so much that it detracts from the key focus of the course.

The exercises give you a great opportunity to actually implement the algorithms covered and really aid understanding.