Deep Learning with Python

I have bought 10 books on ML/DL, and of those this is the 9th book that I have read (actually I have just started reading this book, but it's been so good thus far that I wanted to write a review.) As another reviewer noted, one should read other books on ML/DI to get a deeper understanding of the topic. This book explains using programs instead of using much mathematics. The advantage that I have had is my review of the same topics from other perspectives in books such as the following Intro to statistical learning (by Hastie et al) Intro to Machine Learning (by Alpaydin) Deep Learning (by Goodfellow, Bengio etc) Hands-on ML w SciKit, Keras and Tensorflow (by Geron) When I first tried to read this book by Chollet in early April I was not as conversant with Python, and so I took a break and decided to brush up my limited Python knowledge by going through the first 6 chapters of "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" (by Sweigert). Now that I have more knowledge of Python this book by Chollet is so much more comprehensible. As I said I have the advantage of having learned many of these concepts earlier. I love Chollet's interpretation and explanations. I wish I could do the exercises but am having difficulty setting up the GPU machine. The problem I am dealing with with this book by Chollet is the setup of a GPU machine in the Amazon Cloud. If anyone can help me that would be greatly appreciated (I understand that this is not the forum to seek technical help on AWS, but I thought I'd give it a try)

Just finished the first three chapters of this book and you can really feel the enthusiasm of the author. He put so much effort in making the book comprehensible. For example, he doesn't use math equations to explain the theory of neural network but turn to Python code instead. It proves way easier to understand for me, someone working in industry for years. He begins by going straight into our first neural network, stating that "we have to start somewhere", which is a very good philosophy. During this "going straight" process, he knows exactly when I, as a beginner, will get puzzled and always put hints at the right place in the book, telling me not to worry if I don't something. He also uses a lot of metaphors to express concepts, making it fun to read but without loss of accuracy. This book is up-to-date and it is a masterpiece. Will update this review as I read through the book.

Read this cover to cover for my senior project and loved every minute of it, Francois Chollet was somehow able to make a textbook into a page turner, explaining challenging concepts conceptually while giving implementation examples. I also got the second addition and I would recommend using that one just so you are working through up-to-date examples with tensorflow/keras. The field of deep learning is really vast and Chollet covers an impressive amount in this book mostly at a relatively high/applied level, which I think is a good thing. There were a few of the later chapters I wish he went into more depth with, for the advanced computer vision chapter I really which he had touched on some more modern architectures like Mask- RCNN and other stuff

I'm a CS professor, and I chose this for my course in Deep Learning last term. Overall I am happy with the book, and will use it again. It rates 5 (or even 6!) stars for being an approachable introduction to Deep Learning, using the author's excellent Keras library to allow beginners to do remarkable work. My own class of undergrads was building DLNN models to do sophisticated image recognition tasks after just a few weeks. So, why the four stars? Because the book is rather "paint by the numbers". The presentation is filled with "Now you'll do this.." followed by working blocks of code for the student to enter and run. But there are no exercises, code or mathematical. Even the standard backpropagation algorithm is only qualitatively described -- nice pictures of gradient descent in 2 dimensions, but no hard equations. (After all, Keras does it all for you, right?) And as the book ventures into more advanced areas like GANs, VAEs, etc the presentation is increasingly high-level and nonmathematical, providing only a feel for the topics without deep comprehension. Given the depth of the math involved, I suppose I can't blame Chollet for a bit of handwaving. But more rigor with deeper explanations would have been nice.

This is an exceptional book. The author clearly has put a lot of thought into how to present topics and what is the best strategy for teaching the concepts. It is very hard to find a book that is written as clearly and thoughtfully as this one. The author explains all the basics and clears up all the ambiguities that you may find in other books. This is the type of book that can be read by a complete beginner and bring them up to speed very quickly. I cannot say enough about how good this book really is. If you can only buy one book on deep learning, this should be the one you buy.

If you have taken some deep learning classes on Coursera, such as deeplearning.ai or fast.ai class, this book will serve as a refresher and a good tutorial to implement ideas in Keras. While it does not provide deep theoretical concepts, it explains enough to give you an understanding of what each layer does (conv1D, conv2D, LSTM, GRU, Dense, etc.) It also teaches about different ways to assemble the networks. I especially like the chapter that talks about the functional API, where you can have multiple inputs, and multiple outputs, and layer weight sharing. Most of the other books I read only talked about Sequential models. This book is not for you, if you are looking for mathematical explanations. It's perfect for someone who is not too interested in equations, and just want to have practical understanding.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I have Geron's book on machine learning which is good but I was looking for an explanation of what is under the covers behind the python functions in tensorflow. Chollet, the author of this book, provides an excellent tutorial on the basics. He breaks down complex algorithms involving tensors to the many underlying simple calculations. I like the way he uses python notation to explain the mathematical constructs and operations rather than subscript indices found in most books. Explanations are aided by effective conceptual diagrams. I also like the way he advises when sections can be skipped if the reader has familiarity with specific topics. I find the writing highly readable.

Coming from a non-data science background (IT networking), data science is an add-on skill to my foundation. I do not need to fully understand all of the mathematical theory - instead I need to know how to use deep learning to develop use-cases. I bought this book to understand what I could do with deep learning in Keras. I got so much more than I expected. Having written a single chapter in my own book about algorithms in general, I understand the challenges of trying to explain algorithms enough for general understanding, while not getting too far down the rabbit hole. I thought this book went to a perfect depth to understand the possibilities with deep learning, and to get hands on creating useful outcomes. Thanks Francois for the time well spent.

+ Un des livres pilliers de l'IA (ou plutôt, Deep Learning et Machine Learning) avant même la vague de mode actuelle, à lire absolument

Ótimo livro. Fiquei muito satisfeito com a compra. Linguagem simples e de boa compreensão. Único ponto negativo é que ele é todo preto e branco. Não possui figuras coloridas.

Excellent book to get a quick start on deep learning! This is not a book to learn the theoretical aspects of deep-learning, rather it is a collection of hands-on examples to work through and learn by experience and the guidance provided by the author. That said, if you have seen neural networks from the 1990s along with the back propagation algorithm, and you can visualize the concepts of gradient descent and convolution, then this material is very easy to follow The examples are setup on the Keras framework using TensorFlow as the backend engine. I used an EC2 p2.xlarge instance as suggested by the author. The setup required a bit of help beyond what's provided in Appendix B. Once setup though you will need to run from a virtual environment: "source activate tensorflow_p36". . . . . . My final thought is that after having read Chapter 7, I want to do a second pass using callbacks and tensorboard for better insight.

I like this product

Libro increíble, escrito de forma muy clara y accesible. Se lee rápido y resulta mucho más sencillo que otros textos más académicos. Aun siendo introductorio, proporciona una base tremenda para entender los conceptos fundamentales del deep learning y aprender a aplicarlos en la práctica con Keras. Ideal para quienes quieran empezar en este campo con un enfoque práctico, sin perder rigor. Muy recomendable como primer contacto antes de pasar a lecturas más avanzadas.