One of the authors here, happy to answer any questions should anyone have them.

For information on the neural net framework we wrote, check out the 'guide page' that summarizes the main functions:

http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/NeuralNetworks.h...

The tutorial collection should give a good sense of how high-level and clean the framework is:

http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/NeuralNetwork...