Top 6 Must-Read Books for Beginners in AI and ML

I've read 25+ AI/ML books in 8 years.
I always always recommend these 6 books to someone getting into ML/AI

My recommendations:
Start building first, and read these alongside
Don’t wait to “finish” learning before you start doing!

1️⃣ Practical Statistics for Data Scientists by Peter Bruce & Andrew Bruce
A must-have foundation that stays useful across roles.
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2️⃣ NLP with Transformers by Lewis Tunstall, Leandro von Werra & Thomas Wolf
A solid foundation before diving into LLMs. Its highly important to know the pre-LLM era - comes very handy when working on Language data.
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3️⃣ Hands-On Large Language Models by Jay Alammar & Maarten Grootendorst
From embeddings to RAG to fine-tuning - complete coverage
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4️⃣ Designing Machine Learning Systems by Chip Huyen
The perfect start for understanding real-world ML development. Covers everything from data pipelines to model deployment.
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5️⃣ Machine Learning System Design Interview by Ali Aminian & Alex Xu
A goldmine for structured thinking. Not just for interview preparation - it gives a good overview of how complex ML system could get, this definitely broadens your thoughts.
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6️⃣ AI Engineering by Chip Huyen
Covers LLMs, RAG systems, infrastructure choices, multi-modal setups - very current, very practical.
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Whoever is getting started must check them out.
There are soo many learnings at fundamental level these books offer that many books dont.

Once you understand fundamentals properly, all harder concepts gets easier.
Hence my recommendation 😇

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