This book was written for anyone who wishes to explore deep learning from scratch or broaden their understanding of deep learning.Whether you’re a practicing machine-learning engineer, a software developer, or a college student, you’ll find value in these pages. This book offers a practical, hands-on exploration of deep learning.

It avoids mathematical notation, preferring instead to explain quantitative concepts via code snippets and to build practical intuition about the core ideas of machine learning and deep learning. You’ll learn from more than 30 code examples that include detailed commentary, practical recommendations, and simple high-level explanations of everything you need to know to start using deep learning to solve concrete problems. The code examples use the Python deep-learning framework Keras, with TensorFlow as a backend engine. Keras, one of the most popular and fastest-growing deep learning frameworks, is widely recommended as the best tool to get started with deep learning.

After reading this book, you’ll have a solid understanding of what deep learning is, when it’s applicable, and what its limitations are. You’ll be familiar with the standard workflow for approaching and solving machine-learning problems, and you’ll know how to address commonly encountered issues. You’ll be able to use Keras to tackle real-world problems ranging from computer vision to natural-language processing: image classification, time series forecasting, sentiment analysis, image and text generation, and more.

This book is written for people with Python programming experience who want to get started with machine learning and deep learning. But this book can also be valuable to many different types of readers. Even technically minded people who don’t code regularly will find this book useful as an introduction to both basic and advanced deep-learning concepts.

In order to use Keras, you’ll need reasonable Python proficiency. Additionally, familiarity with the Numpy library will be helpful, although it isn’t required. You don’t need previous experience with machine learning or deep learning: this book covers from scratch all the necessary basics. You don’t need an advanced mathematics background, either—high school–level mathematics should suffice in order to follow along.