sure, there's 2 sides, the maths and the programming/systems

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the math is mostly the same math that physics and EE majors do for first 2 years, plus probability/stats:

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/courses/cs281/#schedule

http://www.zipfianacademy.com/blog/post/46864003608/a-practi...

http://fastml.com/math-for-machine-learning/

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the general purpose programming languages mostly used are python, C++, java, and the statistical languages include R, matlab.

there's lots of good threads at /r/machineLearning, including

http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2i68f0/tack...

http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/2jw14w/which_fields...

also some books for people who haven't the rigorous math background yet are Intro Statistical Learning (James et al), the ones by Peter Flach, Steven Marsland, and Witten/Franke:

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Practical-Techniques-Manag...

http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Algorithmic-Perspecti...

We use this book for statistical models and data mining, combined with econometric models (GMM, 2LS)

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Practical-Techniques-Manag...

If you want a "less math" machine learning book, I like these two:

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, Third Edition

Ian H. Witten, Eibe Frank, Mark A. Hall

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Practical-Techniques-Manag...

Machine Learning: An Algorithmic Perspective

Stephen Marsland

http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Algorithmic-Perspecti...