Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)

I am a software developer and worked on applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) in cognitive fields for my patent work (pending). This book is highly regarded in RL literature and is probably one of the few hand counted books that explicitly address RL as a subject. The book has good balance between subject matter and theory which makes it unique. However this book has many serious drawbacks. Had there been excellent books on this subject I would have discouraged you to have this one. Rather my advice would be referring to the book "Approximate Dynamic Programming" by "Warren B. Powell" as well. This DP book has formalized the terms used in Sutton's book. This might save you from the ambiguous terminologies used in Sutton's book. You might like to refer to these two excellent & precise works by Abhijjit Gosavi: //web.mst.edu/ ~gosavia/ tutorial.pdf and //web.mst.edu/ ~gosavia/ joc.pdf.