Recently, I have gathered enough interest in the subject Linguistics. As I came to know that Indus Valley scripts are among the last remaining undeciphered scripts of the ancient world, I gained more curiosity. In a TED talk by Rajesh Rao he talks about various computational linguistics methods he and his team from TIFR/JNCASR and other universities used to make some progress towards understanding the Indus Valley Script. This has made me more interested in the subject and I landed upon his research papers (take this one, for example), and obviously, I could not make out much having no background in linguistics in general.
As in the accepted answer for this question, it was noted that the answer depended on `` "What are you interested in in linguistics?" ", here's my interest: I have no background in linguistics but my end goal is to understand Rajesh Rao's works and also other works done by other researchers on the Indus Valley script or proto-Indo-Aryan languages in general, in the technical terms of the subject. However, I am in no hurry to learn the subject and I can begin to learn with any Popular Book on the subject (linguistics in general) aimed at a layman audience and slowly build my way up to reach my interest. If any of the experts here can kindly recommend me a route or a chart to start with Popular books on linguistics, and to reach to a stage where may be I can at least begin to understand the technical terminologies used in the most modern researches on the proto-Indo-Aryan languages, the help would be appreciated.
My background: I am a PhD candidate in theoretical Physics. So in recommending the route please don't shy away from recommending technical books, which involve mathematics or other technical concepts, at later stage as I am familiar with learning academic subjects.