I've heard nothing but good reviews of the online version of the class. I took the class at Stanford (and actually worked on the system mentioned in the article) and I found its content to be useful. I believe that the online version contains less theory but this is not necessarily a bad thing if all you want is an introduction.

I've also found reading papers to be illuminating: often the first article about a given classifier is fairly well written and accessible if you have a strong background in math.

This is also a useful thing to keep in mind: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/tutorial/machine_learning_map...