Basic machine learning

There is a good Stanford Open Course about machine learning with video lectures etc.
Take a look here.

If you want to begin with something simple, consider a quasi-linear model, such as logistic regression or linear discriminant analysis: they are easy to understand, and there is code for them all over the Internet. Also consider some of the simpler (single node) neural models (perceptron, delta rule, etc.): they are very easy to program. If you want to pursue this, I suggest getting a book, such as "Computer Systems That Learn", by Weiss and Kulikowski.

Maybe you can start by searching wikipedia for various classification algorithms like k-nearest-neighbour, SVM or neural network