Foundations of Computational Agents (2010)

Yeah I'm no expert so I can't really comment on which book is better. But as someone who knows nothing about AI I'm finding this book pretty fascinating. Seems like a fairly gentle introduction to me.

And I definitely appreciate that it's freely available online.

I have a chip on my shoulder for people using the term "artificial intelligence" to refer to combinatorial heuristic search problems rather than to computational agents based on statistical learning. The thing being, combinatorial heuristic search problems and first-order logic proof systems tend to solve very few real-world problems badly.