If you want to be an ML scientist and build actual models then you just need a lot of math and just enough programming skills for prototyping, go with any language and if you can code what you want then that is great. One thing to note is I have in my experience seen people only with a grad education and research experience in this field and some of them don't code they just write down algos and let developers implement that, so you might want to consider that.

If you want to be MLOps or data engineer that doesn't require much math or an advance degree, then start with books specific for those fields since these roles have slightly different stack.

One rule of thumb, if you are just dipping your toes in, is to start with a language that has great and free resources available, for ML (learning and prototyping) that happens to be python, but you need C++ if you actually want to deploy your model for a decent size industrial project.