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The Little Learner: A Straight Line to Deep Learning
A new book in the same series as The Little Schemer!
Here's a preview of the first two chapters: https://mitpress.ublish.com/ebook/the-little-learner-a-straight-line-to-deep-learning-preview/12735/C1 https://mitpress.ublish.com/ebook/the-little-learner-a-strai...
- frr149 4y agoShut up and take my money! Now!
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- runevault 4y agoThis looks interesting, though I'd probably do at LEAST little schemer finally before checking this one out (been meaning to pick up some of the Little x books but haven't, though I've been getting back to lisp through CL on things like PAIP).
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- solaxun 4y agoNothing little about a 450 page book, but still... I have to buy it.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoi think the little part is the chapter sizes on purpose
- Y_Y 4y agoI think the little learner is the reader rather than the book
- dark-star 4y agoWow, I would really like to get this book to complete my set of the Little Schemer, the Seasoned Schemer and the Reasoned Schemer. But 55$ is almost twice as expensive as the other books. Yes, it is bigger than those but still... Have to think about this for a while :)
- scruple 4y agoThere's also "The Little Typer" and "The Little Prover."
- troupe 4y agoYou aren't helping him. :)
- legerdemain 4y agoIn the same series, there's also "A Little Java" by Matthias Felleisen, one of the creators of Racket (a popular Lisp). https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561150/a-little-java-a-few-patterns/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561150/a-little-java-a-few-p...
- tjr 4y agoAnd The Little MLer.
- naraic0o 4y agoWhich, it seems, is out of print and I guess because a lot of people want a complete set of this series, costs > 500USD to buy used?? Woah. I should get my hands on the others while they're still in print.
- bainsfather 4y agoIs it still good? I see it was published in 1997. I like the style of these books, and might read this one - I'm just worried that Java has changed quite a bit since then. Is it still, say, 90% OK?
- boredemployee 4y agoWhy is this book so special, could someone enlighten me?
- hedgehog0 4y agoDan Friedman and the Little X-er series.
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- senthil_rajasek 4y agoI've read the Little Schemer and based on that, it has a unique style of teaching. Every new concept begins as a fun little question and through a series of more questions expands to a whole concept. It worked very well for me in learning functional programming and some computational theory ideas. Worth it.
- amelius 4y agoIt's special because it ignores the fact that the rest of the world uses Python for deep learning and it's an easy language for beginners too.
- drcode 4y agothis series of books has an unusual pedagogical style, with a big "bang for the buck" in terms of building up complex systems from basic steps 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
- rootusrootus 4y ago> 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.
- 4y ago
- bigdict 4y agoNo way. Does it use Scheme? EDIT: Half Life 3 confirmed: "Presents key ideas of machine learning using a small, manageable subset of the Scheme language"
- rootusrootus 4y agoVery much so.
- hedgehog0 4y agoYes. At least from the preview.
- tejtm 4y agoHave not tries this one (yet) but Racket/base is fine for the previous books.
- pbk1 4y agoIIRC you can use Racket base so long as you define the “atom” function per the book authors
- zelphirkalt 4y agoSome time ago I wrote this: https://notabug.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-ml https://notabug.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-ml -- It contains a parallelized decision tree implementation in GNU Guile, a Scheme dialect. There is also https://github.com/lloda/guile-ffi-cblas https://github.com/lloda/guile-ffi-cblas which at least gives fast matrix multiplication. Example usage I have here: https://notabug.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-math-examples/src/master/matrices/matrix-multiplication.scm https://notabug.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-math-examples/src... I don't know what is in the book, but things are possible.
- bigdict 4y agoFor sure, Lecun wrote a DL framework in Lisp decades ago.
- jkmcf 4y agoAre there other books written in this format? I know _why wrote his books as a conversation between two foxes.
- tmountain 4y agoYes, a whole series. Look until the author for more.
- Jtsummers 4y agoThe Little Schemer (formerly LISPer) - Intro to Scheme, or perhaps an introduction to computing with Scheme. Guess it depends on perspective. The Seasoned Schemer - More on Scheme. The Reasoned Schemer - Minikanren in Scheme The Little Prover - Proofs about programs The Little Typer - Dependent types The Little MLer - The ML language, not machine learning. A Little Java - Java I have the first 5 books, but never got around to finishing Little Prover or Typer (got married and moved that year, probably not the best time to try and start something like that). Definitely like the first three and what I read in those other two.
- selimthegrim 4y agoSmullyan, but those are decades old and not application focused.
- tluyben2 4y agoIf this is anything like the others in the series. I really like the style of the others; it is a really good way of learning for me. And the little prover&typer was when I already was well versed in the theory but they were really good to work through nonetheless. So yep, must have. If you haven’t read the rest, they are really must haves imho.
- bzhang255 4y agoThe initial preview is a little disappointing because it feels like it does a great job displaying the pedagogical style but not enough to demonstrate the pedagogical value (i.e. whether this resource actually does a good job teaching a complex topic). Given the wealth of information and the problem of appraising it all, I don't think it helps this book that it costs $55 and requires the reader to learn an esoteric language (for the field), when there are so many educational books and lecture series by experts in the field that you can find freely available online.
- jhbadger 4y agoI would think that the main audience for this books would be people who enjoyed the other books in the authors' "Little" series, which almost all use Scheme, so it wouldn't be something new to learn.
- sn9 4y agoThe great thing about Scheme is that you can learn it in less than 10 minutes and focus on the ideas.
- bzhang255 4y agoSure - but I think that's the least important part of my comment. The preview is basically just an intro to Scheme. I would rather be able to see how well the book covers interesting ideas about deep learning. While the jury is still out, my personal skepticism is that this is a really beautiful passion project that looks great on bookshelves, but that any serious learner would be better served dedicating their time to working through the existing, more traditional, and very high-quality resources available online.
- zelphirkalt 4y agoThis is what the book has to say (part of a foreword by Peter Norvig): > Maybe, maybe not. But even if you use a machine learning toolkit like TensorFlow or PyTorch, what you will take away from this book is an appreciation for how the fundamentals work.
- cinjon 4y agoAt what age is this appropriate?
- nextos 4y agoI hope this motivates an effort to add great bindings to TF/Torch from Racket/Scheme.
- d0m 4y agoVery cool! I have such fond memories of The Little Schemer
- mattfrommars 4y agoSomeone who has access to O'Reilly and other free source to learn ML/AI e.g. Fast.ai, is there any advantage of buying this?
- havercosine 4y ago'Little..' series books are famous for their pedagogical style: small bit of concepts, presented as a dialogue, making you think at each step, in a well thought out order. It will appeal to anyone who wants to build it out themselves, understand the 'big' ideas in the field. Skim through the second chapter to see how this will be done: they define line function in inverted way where slope and intercept are taken as parameters later. Feels weird but exactly the mental model shift we should be doing when thinking about ML. Read the preface. A very high praise coming from Guy Steele Jr and Peter Norvig. At the same time, a warning! Scheme based introductions don't appeal to everyone. Some people feel way out of comfort zone in coding with it (which is sad because it is much simpler). Also, the utilitarian appeal is low: it won't right away see a step change in your Pytorch knowledge or whatever. The appeal of these books is to think deeply about fundamental ideas by implementing them in simplest language without too much help. In short, YMMV. But if you have a long term view it might help you a lot than sort of currently fashionable trends. (Though I must admit that fast.ai is not just a flavor of the season resources but much better!)
- hedgehog0 4y agoSo you mean that fast.ai maybe a better resource for people new to general ML?
- havercosine 4y agoWell, hard to say if it is a better resource. But it will appeal to those who are in a hurry (and yes, it is okay to be in a hurry). For example, fast.ai first chapter will have you build a dogs vs cats classifier. But how do they build it? By doing `from fastai.vision import *`. They justify it by claiming to use Teaching the whole game approach. If you are a somewhat experienced engineer who already knows Python, what is Jupyter then this approach will get you started quickly. For someone who feels did I spend my time/money but nothing exciting is happening yet, this is a good start. But for some it is crazy and makes them feel even more scared (what is happening with all this imports, how does it work). My criticism with fast.ai, (I am part time educator), is that this approach is an information overload and poor sequencing. Their comparison with Teach whole game approach is flawed because a game of, say Football, is essentially simple. So you can say just start kicking around. But we don't teach chess this way. It is accepted that you have to spend some time upfront to learn the rules before you can play even simple game. Sure one need not learn castling or en-passant upfront. But you get the drift. This book (looking at the preview chapters) is going to follow the lego blocks approach or bottoms up approach to build it. For me, this is correct way to teach supervised ML focussed on neural networks and deep learning. We have a problem of too many library plumbers in the ML field currently. People who can piece together library function calls without knowing why it is working. But this house of cards is not sustainable strategy to build AI based application over long term. Long story short, the book will need patience but that patience will be worth it!
- kamaal 4y agoNot yet available in India. Hope they launch soon!
- SomeHacker44 4y agoI went through some of the eBook providers but none seem to be offering a PDF version. Did anyone notice if a PDF version was for sale?
- rychco 4y agoI’m also interested in this. Unfortunately, the other schemer/typer books appear to be available for kindle… so that’s likely the best we’ll get
- anjanb 4y agoI didn't find one. However, amazon has a kindle version, which might not be what you're looking for!
- alostpuppy 4y agoJust to piggy back on this. The typesetting seems off kindle and other ebook platforms. Anyone seeing this?
- tauchunfall 4y agoI bought "The Reasoned Schemer" as physical book and searched for a way to buy it as a PDF version, but could find it nowhere (also had no problem to pay twice for the book). The Kindle version of it does not even have fixed table cell width for the layout of the conversation. German book website buecher.de has "The Little Learner" to preorder as ePUB with Adobe DRM. I don't know, if you can buy digital books on this site outside of Germany. Also notice, that copy-protected digital books on this website are highly unusual; most of the books are with watermark instead, if at all. I have no clue why a book with pedagogical background and custom layout, has copy-protection and no print-quality PDF version (but instead one with poor layout).
- superdisk 4y agoI helped proofread this book, definitely check it out.
- hedgehog0 4y agoWhat do you think of this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34812501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34812501
- john29917958 4y agoYou are the best!
- krsrhe 4y ago[dead]
- darthrupert 4y agoI have none of these "The Little" books in my bookshelf, and I would gladly purchase a bunch of them. Are there any such deals anywhere?