The topic is really interesting, and this book had a big impact in my understanding of the world, yet I found it pretty annoying to read. The grudge born by J. Pearl against the statistics community who rejected his ideas is way too present in the book IMHO. He's almost like “I was right all along you fuckers, who's the boss now!” on every single page, and I feel it's really disserving his ideas.

I think "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems" is a better starting point for Pearl. Not much easier but more familiar ground if you're coming from today's ML mindset.

As an aside, once while reading through Wasserman's "All of Statistics", he somehow hypnotized me into seeing the title of Ch.16 as "Casual Inference", so anyone who knows me knows that I can't help making a dad-joke about casual inference when the topic comes up.