I've been interested in Artificial Intelligence for sometime though never had much opportunity to engage in it due to work and family. I had more of a layman's view of AI until recently. I would think of AI as HAL from 2001 (1969) or IBM's Deep Blue vs Garry Kasparov (1997) using brute force searches -- bound to happened eventually if you had enough hardware. And then IBM's Watson 2011 Jeopardy game with language recognition. Wow! Now it is seems a week doesn't go by without some sort of AI break though. Discussion in the press about robots taking our jobs, AI taking over the world, killer machines soon on the loose are common place. The AI is transitioning to machine learning, of which neural networks has been the most succesful. And from the books (and all of the press announcements) the most successful type of machine learning are using neural networks. Time for more reading...
A few years ago I was amazed when MIT released their entire Computer Science curriculum for public consumption (courses) -- I'm still amazed. 
Completely free, other than buying the text book. I eventually followed the undergraduate 6.034 Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2010) course, through the videos and the Winston text book, "Artificial Intelligence, 3rd edition" (1993). I didn't do any coding due to time constraints. Pretty interesting course and it brought back memories 30+ years ago of my first college experience. The big change is that absorbing the information takes a lot more effort that it did when was I younger. The 6.034 class was mainly focused on different types of tree searches and best search path. It was interesting to think that anything could be placed into a tree and then searched.
The Winston AI text book is good but published in 1993. I wanted something more current so I bought one of the highly cited AI books: Russell / Norvig: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2010). The book is comprehensive but for my technical level, difficult. In fact, I'm still going through it. One advantage is that their coding repository does contain Java sources. I'll be updating this entry as I go through the book.