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Introduction

After analyzing the 5 best books on Artificial Intelligence, it is clear that the best book in the field is definitely Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, and I'll tell you why. The amount of books being written on AI at this very moment is unfathomable, but guess what? Most of them aren't even actually about Artificial Intelligence!

Almost all the books on AI answer these two questions:

How do I make money off AI? How can we prepare for AI doomsday?

There are very few resources answering the third question:

How do I build Artificial Intelligence?

This is where Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach actually provides value.

Background and details

The book was written by Peter Norvig and Stuart Russell, two famous American computer scientists. Peter is currently the Director of Research at Google and Stuart is a Lecturer at the University of California. They are highly qualified in the field of AI.

Distributed as the primary resource for many universities and colleges around the world and has over 200 customer reviews on Amazon. This book is not a short read with over 1000 detailed pages, it's an extremely extensive introduction to the full-flavored field of Artificial Intelligence. From beginner to expert - this book contains techniques that can be applied to Software development for building great AI applications.

The thing that stands out the most about this book was the sheer breadth. It branches far across the field, providing extensive examples and explanations. It introduces intelligent AI Agent design, through to AI algorithm techniques in-detail. There is also a heavy emphasis placed on Graph theory, Probability, and Statistics. Implementations of graph algorithms including the A* Search coupled with AI agent navigation.

Other highly ranked reviews

On Quora, it has been asked "What are the best books to start with Artificial Intelligence for a computer science student?" Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach appeared several times being the #1 pick for learning Artificial Intelligence.

We went a little further to find this question which was posed on StackExchange, asking "What is the best book for learning Artificial Intelligence?". The top answer shows and I quote, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell & Norvig".

Another question on StackExchange, "Best starting resources for learning about AI?" showing the top voted answer and top of the book list - "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by Russell and Norvig".

Conclusion

To top it off, there are several companion resources that come along with this book. I noticed that there is a GitHub repository found here, providing code examples and exercises from the book itself. I don't think this was available when I was reading the book, but it's surely a great companion resource to have! It also seems to provide AI examples in different languages, such as Java, Python, Scala, and Javascript. This book is certainly a great resource for someone looking to learn Artificial Intelligence.