★★★★★ 1
A rushed, poorly written guide of how the "experts" can't really explain what Deep Learning is
Format: Hardcover
This book, in every sense of the word, is rushed. I think the authors wanted to establish themselves as leaders of this young-ish field, but does so by sacrificing quality. It also shows that Deep Learning theory has been there for a long time, known by another name called Neural Networks. The interesting algorithms are of MLP, Back Propagation and the classical neural networks. The optimization methods such as Adam are the ones that are new and interesting, and the only ones worthy of in this book. So, essentially, what you get from this book is use A for X, B for Y and C for Z type of dry, un-intuitive, badly written waste of paper.
As for the structure of the book, it's like an example of how not to structure a book. It has some linear algebra, probability at the start (not good enough, and confuses more people and wastes paper). Goes on to prove other algorithms such as PCA (yeah, ok!). Then, talks about how this architecture works for this and that architecture.
So, yeah, if you really want to try out deep learning, don't buy this book. Set up Tensorflow/pytorch/ other library, run the tutorials, find an architecture for the problem you are interested in and start tweaking that. You will have far more fun and would have saved your money.
The praise that this book gets is beyond me. Did Musk even read this book? I doubt it.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2018