[poulsbohemian]

I'm sitting ten feet from my copy of Artificial Intelligence, a modern approach – Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig. While I will say it has a lot of still worthwhile basic information, I really wouldn't recommend it. It's an enormous book, so physically difficult to read, but also the bulk of the content is somewhere between dated and terse. I went through school and studied AI ten years before it was written, and I'm glad I didn't use it as an undergrad textbook - would have been overwhelming.

One of the problem with AI is exactly what you noted above - there are a lot of subcategories and my gut tells me these will grow. For the real neophyte, I'd say start with something that interests you or that you need for work - you likely aren't going to digest all of this in a month and probably no single book will meet all your needs.