Comment by mattfrommars

3 years ago

Someone who has access to O'Reilly and other free source to learn ML/AI e.g. Fast.ai, is there any advantage of buying this?

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mattfrommars

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havercosine  3 years ago

'Little..' series books are famous for their pedagogical style: small bit of concepts, presented as a dialogue, making you think at each step, in a well thought out order. It will appeal to anyone who wants to build it out themselves, understand the 'big' ideas in the field. Skim through the second chapter to see how this will be done: they define line function in inverted way where slope and intercept are taken as parameters later. Feels weird but exactly the mental model shift we should be doing when thinking about ML.

Read the preface. A very high praise coming from Guy Steele Jr and Peter Norvig.

At the same time, a warning! Scheme based introductions don't appeal to everyone. Some people feel way out of comfort zone in coding with it (which is sad because it is much simpler). Also, the utilitarian appeal is low: it won't right away see a step change in your Pytorch knowledge or whatever. The appeal of these books is to think deeply about fundamental ideas by implementing them in simplest language without too much help.

In short, YMMV. But if you have a long term view it might help you a lot than sort of currently fashionable trends. (Though I must admit that fast.ai is not just a flavor of the season resources but much better!)

  • hedgehog0  3 years ago

    So you mean that fast.ai maybe a better resource for people new to general ML?

    • havercosine  3 years ago

      Well, hard to say if it is a better resource. But it will appeal to those who are in a hurry (and yes, it is okay to be in a hurry). For example, fast.ai first chapter will have you build a dogs vs cats classifier. But how do they build it? By doing `from fastai.vision import *`. They justify it by claiming to use Teaching the whole game approach. If you are a somewhat experienced engineer who already knows Python, what is Jupyter then this approach will get you started quickly. For someone who feels did I spend my time/money but nothing exciting is happening yet, this is a good start. But for some it is crazy and makes them feel even more scared (what is happening with all this imports, how does it work).

      My criticism with fast.ai, (I am part time educator), is that this approach is an information overload and poor sequencing. Their comparison with Teach whole game approach is flawed because a game of, say Football, is essentially simple. So you can say just start kicking around. But we don't teach chess this way. It is accepted that you have to spend some time upfront to learn the rules before you can play even simple game. Sure one need not learn castling or en-passant upfront. But you get the drift.

      This book (looking at the preview chapters) is going to follow the lego blocks approach or bottoms up approach to build it. For me, this is correct way to teach supervised ML focussed on neural networks and deep learning. We have a problem of too many library plumbers in the ML field currently. People who can piece together library function calls without knowing why it is working. But this house of cards is not sustainable strategy to build AI based application over long term.

      Long story short, the book will need patience but that patience will be worth it!

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