The book is quite approachable for people who are curious about ML and don't necessarily have a strong math background, though. After reading it, other ML literature has been quite a bit easier for me to follow.

In its defense, I think the Python code was written to be readable, rather than necessarily idiomatic. I started doing the exercises in Lua, and haven't had a hard time translating them thus far.

I'm not a computer scientist nor really a programmer and I found it very readable. Care to elaborate?

I read it when it came out which was a while ago. I found it to be very unidiomatic Python at the time.

More critique at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208895 if you'll chase the parent links.

Idiomatic, no (agreed). Very readable, yes (I think the style was intentional). For tutorials, I generally implement everything myself as part of the learning process and avoid source copy-pasting. So I wasn't irked but YMMV depending on learning style.