Useful introductory books and blogposts on neural networks

Here's a list of books and blogposts on neural networks and related aspects that I have found particularly useful. In general, I like very simple examples - preferably with python code - to introduce me to a topic.

Books

Make Your Own Neural Network

This book is an excellent place to start. The book explains the basics of NNs and guides you through writing your own 3-layer NN code from scratch and applying it to the MNIST set. The book even introduces you to Python, so this is something virtually anyone can do. My only (minor) complaint is that the code uses classes, which can be quite difficult for beginners to grasp and it not really needed here.

Deep Learning for the Life Sciences: Applying Deep Learning to Genomics, Microscopy, Drug Discovery, and More
This book offers brief and to-the-point descriptions of some of the major classes of NNs, such CNN and RNN in the first chapters and then walks you though many interesting applications using the DeepChem library. This book gets you started using NNs very quickly and is an excellent supplement to the more basic or more theoretical approaches in this list.

Artificial Intelligence Engines: A Tutorial Introduction to the Mathematics of Deep Learning
This is a more formal treatment of deep learning but I still found it (mostly) very readable and there are several useful pseudo-code examples with Python equivalents. The topics are discussed in roughly chronological order, so you also get a good feel for how the NN field developed including major milestones.

Blogposts

Build a Recurrent Neural Network from Scratch in Python – An Essential Read for Data Scientists

This is basically the equivalent of Make Your Own NN but for a RNN applied to a toy problem.

Introduction to Convolutions using Python and Playing with convolutions in Python

Both posts offer some very simple Python examples of what convolution actually means for images.

How to do Deep Learning on Graphs with Graph Convolutional Networks

A very simple Python introduction to graph convolution, which works quite bit differently from image convolution.

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