Machine learning algorithms hold out extraordinary promise, but the reality is that their success depends entirely on the suitability of the data available. This book is about Ripple-Down Rules (RDR) an alternative manual technique for rapidly building AI systems. With a human in the loop, RDR is much better able to deal with the limitations of the data. Ripple-Down Rules: The Alternative to Machine Learning starts by reviewing the problems with data quality, and the problems with conventional approaches to incorporating expert human knowledge into AI systems. It suggests that problems with knowledge acquisition arise because of mistaken philosophical assumptions about knowledge. It argues people never really explain how they reach a conclusion, rather they justify their conclusion by differentiating between cases in a context, and RDR is based on this more situated understanding of knowledge. The central features of an RDR approach are explained, and detailed worked examples are presented for different types of RDR, based on freely available software developed for this book. The examples ensure developers have a clear enough idea of the simple yet counter-intuitive RDR algorithms to easily build their own RDR systems. It has been proven in industrial application that it takes only a minute or two per rule to build RDR systems with perhaps thousands of rules. The industrial uses of RDR have ranged from medical diagnosis, through data cleansing to chatbots in cars. RDR can be used standalone or to improve the performance of machine learning or other methods.