This book is a pretty decent introduction to the basics of machine learning, although it doesn’t go into much more depth than the three basic kinds of ML algorithms. That is more or less enough for this book, though; the real point is to illustrate how Azure ML works, and it does a reasonable job of walking you through the ML studio, and explaining how to use the APIs it produces. It does get a bit repetitive in the mechanics, which is annoying more than anything else. However, the book also doesn’t do such a good job of exploring the more advanced uses of ML studio (like using custom R code in a module). That said, I did appreciate the dive into the recommendation engine, which seems like a great tool with a lot of interesting applications. All told - if you’re trying to figure out how to get your feet wet with machine learning, this is definitely a good place to start.