This is an excellent introduction to deep learning for those with some technical background. The only reason I deduct a star is that this field has beThis is an excellent introduction to deep learning for those with some technical background. The only reason I deduct a star is that this field has been moving so quickly that the examples are starting to feel stale. That said, even though the book doesn't cover the latest developments or applications, it covers fundamental concepts that are still necessary for understanding more recent developments.
There are many books that do that, so what makes this one special? Despite the title, it's not the illustrations. Although they are useful and were the hook that got my attention, they are not what makes the book great. What makes the book great is that it builds up complexity in layers so that a reader can go from vaguely familiar with deep learning concepts through comfortably reading about, for example, an actual implementation of a digit classifier using convolutional neural nets.
The authors achieve this by structuring the book into three layered parts which use the same examples. The first part gives a high level overview of uses of deep learning by telling the story of its roots in biological and machine vision. It then discussions applications in text processing, image understanding and generation, and game-playing. Part two covers the essential theory of machine learning, building up piece from artificial neurons to defining, training, and improving deep networks. There is a lot of technical substance here, but by building it up bit-by-bit, the reader is able to follow along without too much effort. The third part goes back to the applications from part one and shows applied examples in these domains, touching upon concepts specific to that domain. Throughout, the book is filled with real code examples.
This layered technique to presenting these ideas makes it easy for the reader to build up knowledge. The use of practical examples anchors the knowledge in practice and helps build up intuition by connecting theoretical concepts to real numbers. The use of repeated examples is especially valuable because it allows the reader to understand how using more sophisticated techniques impact the results, often for the better but sometimes not.
Overall, I strongly recommend this book, despite it being three years old in a field where three weeks feels like a long time. ...more
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