front matter
foreword
As a lifelong student of the business of technological innovation, I have often wondered: what sets apart an expert from regular practitioners in any area of technology? An expert tends to have many micro-insights into the subject that often elude the ordinary practitioner. This enables them to come up with solutions that are not visible to others. The primary appeal of this book is to generate that kind of micro-intuitions into the complex subject of machine learning. For all their ubiquitousness, episodic internet recipes do not build such intuitions in a systematic, connected way. This book does.
I also agree with the author’s position that such intuitions are impossible to build without a firm grasp of the mathematical understanding of the core principles of machine learning. Of course, all this has to be combined with programming knowledge, without which it becomes idle theory. I like the way this book attends to both theory and practice of machine learning by presenting the mathematics alongside PyTorch code snippets.