The course is also quite easy to follow without buying the book. I love the exercises in which you are programming an intelligent agent to move through a maze. It reminded me of how we learned programming in university using Karel The Robot.

This alongside Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course was my first exposure to the field. https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

I can also recommend Sebastian Thrun's Artificial Ingelligence for Robotics course: https://www.udacity.com/course/artificial-intelligence-for-r...