I'd recommend new Coursera Washington University ML course (https://class.coursera.org/machlearning-001/lecture) as a solid foundation. You'll learn key ML concepts (bias vs variance, bayes theory etc.) and the lector is simply the best I've seen.
Following that Ian Goodfellow book http://www.deeplearningbook.org/ is very good.
If you want to learn foundations of Reinforcement Learning I'd recommend Sutton & Barto https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/ebook/the-book.h...