You're not going to learn much of anything by just reading a ML/AI book. Well you gotta be pretty good at math to understand everything, my suggestion is to enroll on some ML/stats course and start working on basics. It's long and hard road, and if you're not comfortable with math in general i'd reconsider investing too much time on it. I'm doing it yet i'd much rather do software engineering. Much more practical without math to solve.
So do exercises, spend time digesting and trying to explain things to others. If you feel it's hard, well you are correct. Get comfortable feeling that way. Hopefully theres light at the end of the tunnel. Dont buy into the hype. Know the basics
Edit: so didnt see op said exactly this. My bad, new year and all.
I'd need a lot more remedial mathematics before I could get any mileage out of those ML/AI book recommendations. I haven't touched mathematics in a strict sense since my senior year of high school Calculus (I majored in the humanities), so I think you're absolutely right. People like me would need to spend a lot more time learning things like discrete math and statistics before moving up to these books.
So do exercises, spend time digesting and trying to explain things to others. If you feel it's hard, well you are correct. Get comfortable feeling that way. Hopefully theres light at the end of the tunnel. Dont buy into the hype. Know the basics
Edit: so didnt see op said exactly this. My bad, new year and all.