My suggestion on good book on machine learning should be to answer the hard problems of machine learning towards machine thinking, and machine understanding and machine connecting. Have you found this book?
I suggest "Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms" by shai shalev. It is very good book for those who wants to learn machine learning from start.
It depends on how you define "effective". Is the most effective the most simple-worded/ less formal book? or is the most effective a more complete but denser book? Trevor Hastie has two free books which are just wonderful, The Elements of Statistical Learning https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/Papers/ESLII.pdf, and An introduction to Statistical Learning https://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/ISLR%20First%20Printing.pdf. I highly recommend both as starting point, although neither of those is focused on cloud computing.