Very comprehensive, sufficiently technical to get most of the plumbing behind machine learning. Very useful as a reference book (actually, there is no other complete reference book).

The authors are the real thing (Tibshirani is the one behind the LASSO regularization technique).

Uses some mathematical statistics without the burdens of measure theory and avoids the obvious but complicated proofs.

I own two copies of this edition, one for the office, one for my house, and the authors generously provide the PDF for travelers like me.