Now if you have a bit of a math/engineering background and want to understand how modern AI really works, the two best books/shortcuts to go from beginner to expert are: - Ian Goodfellow's "Deep Learning" http://www.deeplearningbook.org/ - Richard Sutton's "Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction" http://incompleteideas.net/sutton/book/
Another good resource is the three-volume set, "The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence ", also by Feigenbaum. It's a very thorough catalog of programs developed in the 60s and 70s that illustrate various techniques used in AI programs.
In the words of Alan Kay, "the past is vast".
Though I guess it is probably better if he describes it himself, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815