My general philosophy to learning is that it is much more important to know what you don't know than to think you know something. For that reason, I am often a fan of the Very Short Introduction series and the like.

This is not an easy genre to master – it’s very difficult to strike the right balance between breadth and depth. Burkov's book does a great job of it, providing a brilliant executive summary of the entire machine learning landscape (insofar as that is possible). The book is not for pure laymen, though should suffice for the "determined amateur" confident with high-school maths.

I found it to be a nice refresher, as well as a useful survey of some of the recent art in the ML world. I’d definitely recommend it if you want a rough understanding of how several different ML methods work, but the book is probably not suitable if you are looking for a broader picture of how ML will change the world, or specific business applications etc.