What are your thoughts on the vectorized represenation? I understood the object oriented representation after a while, but I've noticed that, despite what looks like magic at first, when there's a lot less code to look at with singular weight vectors for the whole network vs different kinds of neurons, setting up graph structures, etc.it's easier to grok.

This is probably just a personal preference though.

I find if you're tackling neural networks in the first place, it's great to have your fundamentals down in the first place though. I think a lot of the problem with people learning machine learning is that they just dive in to it without going back and understanding the moving parts that make up the whole.

I made that mistake personally when I was starting out a few years ago. I've seen that with others as well.