One thing I've noticed separates serious ML students from casual ones: how much they care about the quality of what they actually study from. I take that pretty seriously myself, so a while back I started digging into what students at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, and USP actually use to complement their studies. What I found surprised me: several of these programs don't assign a textbook at all. Instead, the course staff writes and publishes their own lecture notes, and some of them are ba...