Best Deep Learning book for beginners?

[mippiemoe]

I studied Computer Science in college, but don’t have any experience with Deep Learning. What are some highly respected textbooks about Deep Learning?

[profdean]

I reviewed a book for the Technometrics journal that was just published. The book was called The Essentials of Data Science - Knowledge Discovery Using R by Graham J. Williams (CRC Press, 2017). It is actually a companion to another book called Data Mining with Rattle and R by Graham Williams (Springer, 2011). Great introductions to data science methods including deep neural networks.

[profdean]

I also have two books (actually three but one is at home) on deep learning. One is called Deep Learning by Goodfellow, Bengio and Courville (MIT Press, 2016) and Deep Learning - A Practitioners Approach by Patterson and Gibson (O’Reilly, 2017). The first book has a website at www.deeplearningbook.org and the second one references a website at deeplearning4j.org. The second book is an easier read and relies a lot on Apache Spark. Hope this helps.

[sabalaba]

I really like Goodfellow, Bengio and Courville 2016. @profdean, really agree with that recommendation of yours. They’re all luminaries in the field. The book offers a solid a solid introduction and refresher on the key mathematical concepts used throughout the rest of the book and also a great overview of the field in general written by the greats.

I also like Practical Recommendations for Gradient-Based Training of Deep Architectures (Bengio 2012). It’s a great guide to those just getting started and overwhelmed by all of the hyperparameters involved with training.