A reference implies you already know the topic and just want an index to jog your memory for things you can't hold all in your head at once.
That is different than a pedagogical tool. If so, you shouldn't recommend it to those want to learn the topic.
I agree with the poster below. Outside of classes, lecture notes, the books I listed, and Sutton/Barto (Intro. to Reinforcement Learning) have taught me the material. I use Goodfellow to brush up before interviews or jog my memory about topic I don't work with very often (like computer vision).
- Hastie is a co-author of two machine learning books, one is "Elements of Statistical Learning" which is very comprehensive, and "Introduction to Statistical Learning", which is more approachable by people without too much background in stats.