Asking for advice

[y19177]

Thanks to everyone in this forum. I started learning C++ last Christmas and now I have finished the book C++ Programming: From problem analysis to program design by D.S Malik. I'm looking for advice on How should I proceed in the future.

My aim is to get into machine learning (I don't know Python, no previous programming experience) and also expand my knowledge, and gain more experience in software engineering in general.

I have a master degree in mathematics (my knowledge is mainly in pure math, not applied) and I'm comfortable with all the mathematics I have encountered so far.

Thanks in advance for anyone give me advice and pointing out direction that I should follow. I appreciate all the help that I have got from this forum. Feel free to name any books, sources I should read/use for study purpose. That will be a great help as well.

[lastchance]

For machine learning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_Algorithm

For C++ you can take other peoples' advice (I've only read one of the books) at:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list

But I would encourage you to compare and contrast with other programming languages.

[againtry]

For machine learning try coursera.org and search on machine learning.
Andrew Ng has produced a free introductory book see: https://www.deeplearning.ai/

[jonnin]

I have an on-again, off again love/hate with AI. Its not much, but the biggest things in AI are often the simplest because they are easy to miss or difficult to get balanced just so.
A couple of examples:
- if your data has features in it that do not affect the outcome, some (many? most?) techniques will still train on it and generate false correlations. For example if you show it pictures of blue cars to learn, it may decide that all cars are blue, and a non blue car shown later may get a 'maybe its a car, but.. it isnt blue'.
- the 'elephant' problem -- 5 blind guys touching an elephant trying to tell you what they sense... the guy at the trunk says ists like a snake, the guy on a leg says its like a tree, ... AI is a lot like this at times, unable to see the big picture. We had a very powerful OCR program years ago and for fun fed it some pictures of just random scenery from real life. It replaced birds with the number 7, telphone poles with the letter I or T, ... and so on, because it was a hammer that was looking for a nail, trained to find letters and so everything in the universe was a potential letter.
You will see what I mean as you build a few systems.
Python is slower than basic on a IIE but its easy to learn, and there are a lot of libraries out there. If you want to use it, don't be afraid of learning it, you can seriously learn enough to do a lot of programming in well under a month.