I really like the Introduction to Machine Learning Course that Google has put up on their developer site [0]. It's simple enough that anyone can get into it, while still digging deep enough into the math behind things that it isn't just you learning how to copy and paste code.

Besides reading an actual textbook or learning from an online course like (https://eecs189.org/) which can understandably be somewhat daunting at first, I think this is definitely the next best thing.

[0] https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash-course/