I agree with this. If we're talking about the same thing, many of these are "Machine learning for hackers" type articles and only give a superficial exposure of machine learning with the implicit promise of quick and easy mastery. The problem is, there's really only one way to master this stuff and it's to open up a textbook and study hard. You really need to get a rigorous treatment of the theory to understand machine learning.

there are chapter endnotes and an appendix that looks very helpful.

meta-texts like this one are a must, because the subject is so broad. moreover, i find a lot of the oft-recommended books in this area very noisy on the theory side.

i imagine all of all of the available resources will improve in quality and become more standard over time.

Can you recommend any particular textbook on the subject you like?

I agree also I keep seeing so many articles, tutorials, guides, etc on how to do machine learning, neural nets, a.i., etc. It's like so... which one is the right one, or which one can actually get me from A to Z the easiest.