
Ask HN: Best book about artificial neural networks? - wsieroci
Hi,<p>what book about neural networks or AI in general would you recommend? Which one is the best to learn about this topic from scratch? It would be awesome if it contained also information about the latest discoveries from this field.<p>Best,
Wiktor
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freddealmeida
For neural nets, consider Bengio's book:
[http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/dlbook/](http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/dlbook/)

For something lighter but insightful, Pedro Domingo's The Master Algorithm is
quite fun.

A great number of classes are now available online. I prefer the Stanford
classes. [http://cs229.stanford.edu/](http://cs229.stanford.edu/) and
[http://cs224d.stanford.edu/](http://cs224d.stanford.edu/) are good places to
start. There are more.

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rayalez
I have recently wrote an article collecting the best AI resources:

[https://medium.com/@rayalez/best-deep-learning-
resources-76b...](https://medium.com/@rayalez/best-deep-learning-
resources-76b24c67f9e)

Specifically, I would reccommend AIMA as the best introduction to AI in
general, and a fantastic video course from Berkeley:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCshmLD2MsyqAKBx8ctivb5Q/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCshmLD2MsyqAKBx8ctivb5Q/videos)

and also Andrew Ng's course on coursera:

[https://www.coursera.org/course/ml](https://www.coursera.org/course/ml)

For neural networks there's an awesome course by Hinton:

[https://class.coursera.org/neuralnets-2012-001/lecture](https://class.coursera.org/neuralnets-2012-001/lecture)

and UFLDL tutorial:

[http://deeplearning.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/UFLDL_Tutori...](http://deeplearning.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/UFLDL_Tutorial)

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argonaut
A lot of people are suggesting some bad things.

Some people might take issue with this, but as far as
resources/classes/research groups in academia/textbooks go, AI != machine
learning. And neural networks are a subset of machine learning.

The AIMA book _is_ the best introduction to AI, but only to traditional AI,
which consists mostly of planning/search/inference algorithms (brute force
algorithms, albeit clever brute force algorithms). It is _not_ a book on
machine learning, even if it talks a bit about machine learning.

The Deep Learning book that people mention is _not_ an introductory book on
the subject of neural networks or machine learning.

Your best bet is Andrew Ng's Coursera course as an introduction to ML and
neural nets.

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T-A
For AI, I think this is still the Bible:
[http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/](http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/)

Neural networks are moving fast. A notable attempt featuring one of the
heavyweights, under preparation:
[http://goodfeli.github.io/dlbook/](http://goodfeli.github.io/dlbook/)

Meanwhile there is this recent review by the three main suspects:
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7553/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7553/full/nature14539.html)

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p1esk
For NN from scratch, there's nothing better than this book:
[http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/](http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/)

~~~
TheAlchemist
I cannot agree more - by far the best introduction to NN.

Also, Hugo Larochelle videos are remarkable, though a bit tougher to
understand.

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mindcrash
Jeff Heaton has written a slew nice AI related books

[http://www.heatonresearch.com/book/index.html](http://www.heatonresearch.com/book/index.html)

"Introduction to the Math of Neural Networks" is a really great book to start
with if your math skills are on college algebra level.

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tmaly
My favorite was Practical Neural Network Recipies in C++ by Masters. It was
very accessible and easy to understand.

