To answer the spirit of your question: the really interesting thing about deep models is that once you've developed and trained them the forward pass is really easy to deploy. The forward-only version I did here relies on numeric.js[1] for the basic matrix operations (addition/dot-product etc). The really useful and amazing thing about both TensorFlow/Theano is that they can automatically differentiate the model so that training becomes tractable, meaning the actual linear algebra concepts aren't too hard to grasp. Aside from that, you'll need lots of time, a bit of money, and patience: I first started adapting Dracula from a tutorial[2] (although the structure of the model is different) about a year ago, but things didn't really get started until November last year after I'd bought a decent GPU (a GTX 980). Happy to answer any more questions :D