This book is written in a manner that's accessible for both statistician and engineer. It mentioned the fundamental statistical concepts without needing too much mathematical detail, and provides example codes in R language for each section.
The course is given by Alex Smola, a physicist turned computer scienctist. Alex's training in mathematics and physics allowed him to be both intuitive and precise when giving lecture. He has great insight on the topics of machine learning and their statistical aspects.
Singular value decomposition lays the foundation for principle component analysis, and it is a great linear algebra concepts that has many application in both bio-informatics and image processing.