Machine Learning: a Probabilistic Perspective by Murphy may be a better reference. Murphy has more up-to-date books.
> Both are freely available online. Reading one book will get you to top 5% practitioners and reading both will get you to top 1%
At which percentage do you start meeting math PhDs from top schools? You'll most probably never meet their level of understanding just by reading books or doing exercises. Having read Bishop, I don't have one tenth of the knowledge I'd need to do research at that level, you need more exposure than that.
1. Elements of Statistical Learning (very frequentist treatment) by Hastie et.all [1]
2. Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Bishop(for a Bayesian treatment)[2]
Both are freely available online. Reading one book will get you to top 5% practitioners and reading both will get you to top 1%
[1] https://hastie.su.domains/Papers/ESLII.pdf
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2006/0...