It's not a course where you learn how to implement algorithms, but a general introduction to the concepts and problems that typically are treated under the label 'AI'.
As usual, this is a course that completely ignores the first, oh, 60 or so years of artificial intelligence research which were dominated by logic-based AI, and places most of the focus on deep learning, as the only kind of machine learning that it talks about at any length.
Sometimes, I despair. It's like AI started in 2012 - and was wrapped up the same year. Deep neural nets, problem solved, AI is all done and dusted.
That is what I gave my mom when she asked what she could try programming on. It features a simple whole window editor/repl where you can get straight into business.
What failed was the supporting literature. I thought Realm of Racket would have been ideal for self-study but it did assume more background than she had...
I wasn't a huge fan. It was more about his life and less about his ideas.
If you want a little bit of both, I highly recommend Seife's Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes or Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.
I found the O'Reilly book Mastering Bitcoin excellent.
It's been a while since a tech book gave me such enjoyment. In an age when when word innovation typically is used to mean "I duck-taped these two turds together" it is great to encounter real novelty in tech.
The book makes the wonder of blockchain easily approachable if you have some background in CS and takes some nice excursions to topics like elliptic crypto.
My favorite demo is by Michael Shermer (after 9 minutes): https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_why_people_believe...