Additionally, you should probably learn a (little) R (which you can get from this book). This is not because R is a wonderful language (though I'm pretty fond of it myself) but because it's a great tool for the communication and expression of statistical methods.
Most good stats (which will help you be actually good at ML) books tend to either be written in mathematics, or R (or both). Given that you're already a programmer, R will probably make it easier for you to learn a bunch of this stuff (and the docs for R functions tend to point towards useful literature).
I actually travelled the other way (i.e. from stats to code) and I found R very very helpful. Of course, your mileage may vary, but the link above is probably the best single book that you could read to start learning ML.
Thank you! Providence wills that I have R studio installed to make a wordcloud, but I installed it without actually knowing what it is. (Just followed a tutorial to get my wordcloud :)
So thanks for the recommendation, looking forward reading it!
