Why is this book so special, could someone enlighten me?
I always had trouble with recursive functions when I was new to programming, and many recommended working through "the little schemer" to solve that problem. It was a tough read for me, but the investment was well worth it and it did for me what it said on the tin. I didn't have nearly as much trouble with recursion after that book, but an unfortunate side effect was developing an affinity for lisps which I haven't yet shaken.
Too little of that in this world nowadays. Too much ios and not enough arch linux.
If you have never used lisp, you need to be patient with the notation and resist the urge to balk at what is unfamiliar. I remember grumbling quite a bit when I first went through TLS, but that phase was over pretty quickly and within days I had no trouble following the code.
Are there better ways to introduce deep learning and neural networks? Maybe.. but I like "little" books and there is no better way to learn something than by building it yourself. For that reason alone I'd recommend the book sight unseen (but with the knowledge of prior little books). I do think choosing what is likely an unfamiliar language for most may be somewhat of an impediment for an already challenging topic, but scheme is a simple language and allows the author to focus on the ML concepts.
I'm highly confident you'll learn a lot, if you put in the work. For DL as a separate topic, the best resources I've found are:
- 3 blue 1 brown Neural Net playlist
- Karpathy's "The spelled-out intro to neural networks and backpropagation"It worked very well for me in learning functional programming and some computational theory ideas.
Worth it.
there is zero fluff, almost zero narration
the books are basically just input output pairs of "now do this, and now that happens"
they are basically a sort of brain data dump for people who can think with computer code
In particular, Scheme. If your language of choice is, say, Python, then you'll want to get a primer on Scheme before reading this particular book. Maybe by starting at the beginning of the series.