Primarily I’m writing this blog to help me document my progress through Deep Learning for Coders with fastai & PyTorch by Jeremy Howard and Slyian Gugger (which I shall henceforth refer to the as the fastai book). The fastai book is intended to accompany the Practical Deep Learning for Coders online course offered on fastai link. For those of you who want to follow along you can easily pick the book up from Amazon (or any online retailer for that matter - not sure how widely it is available in old school book stores though) and a free version of the book is also generously offered on their website.
Over the last years I have completed several online course in the vein of Deep Learning. Prior to that I worked through several books and courses on the Python programming language. I may post write ups for the notes I took while studying previously at some point in the future but as of now I won’t commit to that.
My hope is to finish the fastai book by the end of 2020.
You may be wondering what motivates me to study Deep Learning. Well I have been interested in computers and technology since I was a child. Although I did not follow up on this interest at university or during the early years of my career, as time as gone on I’ve become increasingly drawn to learning more about this topic. Initially I started out learning web development, but after struggling to get my head around the finer points of JavaScript I decided to give Python a go (incidentally I initially learnt Python from a book called Think Python by Allen Downey - a great book by a great educator, it’s particularly good if you enjoy a more academic style). And well if you learn Python today I think the odds are pretty good that you will come across the topic of Data Engineering or Deep Learning at some point. Since I also have an amateur interest in Math, Deep Learning seemed the natural area to focus on.
As it happens I already have blog link. However I decided to make a separate one devoted (at least initially) to the fastai book, first because the authors provide an excellent guide on how to setup a blog via GitHub, which I’d not done before, and I feel the theme of my personal blog is quite different. Although I’ve not updated it in some time, that blog does, and will continue to, focus on book reviews.
Lastly, just a word on the format of this blog. My current intention is to write a post based on Chapter of the book and my answers to the quiz at the end of each section. There is also a separate section of this blog were I can post directly from any Jupyter notebook I’ve prepared. Again a useful guide to doing this can be found in the fastai book. It may be possible that I post both reflection and code separately or I may eventually just write the code with comment, but let’s see how it goes for now.
Link to Practical Deep Learning Playlist
Initial thoughts by WS McDonald is licensed under CC BY 4.0