Basically, I work currently as a programmer, but want to do something more exciting in future than what I'm doing more, plus I have a curious nature and like to do mental gymnastics, otherwise I feel like my brains are dying and personally feel like failure.

I've looked into bunch of material, found what I think are good resources, but I'd still like to ask here what are the best books for it and to get extremely good at it from fundamental perspective and then practical perspective.

I have years and years to spend on learning this, so fill me with years of work. If there are books on C++ and practical machine learning, please throw it in here also. I can program and look things up and build stuff, but I know some people here have exceptional, almost unrealistic demands and that's why I came here.