Coming soon · Book Profile
The Hundred-page Machine Learning Book
A compact, practical field guide to the core ideas, algorithms, and workflow of modern machine learning, distilling decades of research into what actually matters in practice.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book condenses the vast body of machine learning knowledge into a lean, readable guide covering supervised, unsupervised, and other learning paradigms. Andriy Burkov walks readers from the mathematical notation and fundamental algorithms (linear and logistic regression, decision trees, SVM, kNN) through neural networks and deep learning, then into the practical craft of feature engineering, regularization, model assessment, and hyperparameter tuning. Rather than exhaustively cataloging every technique, it curates the parts with proven practical value and teaches readers how to think about whether a problem is 'machine-learnable' and which methods to try. It is ideal both for beginners seeking a comfortable grasp of the field and for experienced practitioners wanting a concise reference and a springboard for further self-improvement.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- An aspiring or practicing data analyst / machine learning engineer who wants to build useful predictive models and understand the field enough to ask the right questions.
- The problem
- They need to solve practical problems by building statistical models from data, but the field is vast, mathematical, and scattered across thousand-page textbooks. They feel overwhelmed, unsure whether a problem is even 'machine-learnable' or which technique to try.
- The plan
- Learn the types of learning and how supervised learning works end to end.
- Master the notation, math, and fundamental algorithms (regression, trees, SVM, kNN).
- Understand the anatomy of a learning algorithm and gradient descent.
- Apply basic practice: feature engineering, three sets, regularization, model assessment, hyperparameter tuning.
- Extend to neural networks, deep learning, and specialized problem/solution paradigms.
- The payoff
- The reader can frame practical problems as machine learning tasks, select appropriate algorithms, engineer features, and assess models rigorously. · They work confidently with libraries like scikit-learn and can diagnose and fix underfitting, overfitting, and imbalance.
See our guide
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Additional reading
- OpenAI Prompt Engineering Guide · OpenAI
Official documentation from the model provider on how to craft effective prompts, recommended by the author.
- Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Guide · Anthropic
Official guide from another major LLM provider, offering best practices for prompt design.
- dair-ai/Prompt-Engineering-Guide · DAIR.AI Community
A comprehensive, community-maintained GitHub repository covering a wide range of prompt engineering techniques.
- GPT Researcher · assafelovic
An open-source project that inspired the book's research summarization engine, recommended for further exploration of building production-grade LLM applications.
- Building Effective AI Agents · Anthropic
An article recommended by the author for a deeper understanding of the distinction between agentic workflows and autonomous agents.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) Official Website · Anthropic and Community
The primary source for the MCP specification, tutorials, and ecosystem resources, essential for building or consuming MCP servers.
- FastMCP 2 Documentation · jlowin and community
The official documentation for the recommended Python SDK for building MCP servers, used in the book's example.
- Knowledge Graph Enhanced RAG · Tomaž Bratanič and Oskar Hane
Recommended by the author for readers interested in diving deeper into combining knowledge graphs with RAG.
- Database Management Systems · Gehrke and Ramakrishnan
Referenced in Chapter 2 as a resource for readers unfamiliar with the basics of SQL and Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs), which are foundational for the structured data analysis chapters.
- Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation · Ji, Z., Lee, N., Frieske, R., et al.
Cited in Chapter 2 to explain the concept of 'hallucinations' in LLMs and to underscore the importance of verifying information provided by models.