Andrew Ng's online courses are great to get your feet wet. You use Octave/Matlab to implement the basics of many machine learning models from scratch, and build yourself up to using python to design several popular deep learning models including convolutional and transformers. It's not required, but a good idea to understand at least the basics of linear algebra and calculus.
Interesting. To be honest I really appreciated how they started with Matlab; it gave a very math-centric focus to the fundamentals, although of course you can do all of that with Python too. And I say this as a professional developer.
