Learning Deep Learning (book review)

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Review of Learning Deep Learning: Theory and Practice of Neural Networks, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Transformers Using TensorFlow, by Magnus Ekman (2021)

  • Don’t have to be a researcher to read the book. It’s perfectly fine for a sharp Python engineer.
  • Book examples are written with TensorFlow, but online Jupyter Notebooks are available for both PyTorch and TensorFlow with permissive MIT license
  • While I would have preferred to see PyTorch in the printed book, I need to do the hands-on PyTorch examples anyhow, so it might be even better that I’m forced to use the Jupyter Notebooks.
  • Book explains the differences between TensorFlow and PyTorch.
  • Comprehensive coverage of DL techniques that are industry standards for the past 2-3 years, but have rarely been collected in one place in book form until this book. See Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow for another book that encyclopedically covers DL tricks and techniques, also using TensorFlow (but w/o PyTorch examples)
  • Pointers to research papers throughout.
  • Nice charts at the end with the algorithms and ā€˜tricks of the trade’ for both vision and natural language processing applications. Some tricks work for some, not all applications. Engineers usually work in one field, not both - and have a difficult time sorting out what techniques are specific to their field.

  • While reading this book, I also read Deep Learning with PyTorch, and I follow Stanford’s CS231n course: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition (Spring 2017), both freely available online.
  • Deep Learning with PyTorch has its own Jupyter notebooks (check out my own edited version of the notebooks).