Thanks for this. I checked out the book ToC and found it interesting. One question, does this book assume the knowledge of the tool to start with?
No. The book does assume you know and are comfortable with your calculus and linear algebra, but each topic is covered from the start as it where.
Of course you won't learn enough about any topic to be able to actually tackle any but the most trivial of problems, but you will come away with a good understanding of which technique you should use for which kind of problem and have a good enough of a basis to be able to understand the more advanced books on the given topics. Each chapter also ends with a recommendation of 3-4 books which you can check out if you want to dig deeper into that particular topic.