Similarly, An Introduction to Statistical Learning With Applications in R is like a practical version of (or companion to) Elements. I very much enjoyed it.
Re:Free Data Science Books
by craigching on Wednesday September 09, 2015 @09:29AM
(#10191282)
And the Stanford version of the same class linked above for ISLR is, in my opinion, better:
https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/HumanitiesandScience/S...
EDIT: Oops I should have said "An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R" rather than The Elements of Statistical Learning. The Elements book goes into way too much depth to be a good introduction to the subject.