# Best Deep Learning book for beginners?

## post by mippiemoe on Oct 12, 2017

I studied Computer Science in college, but don’t have any experience with Deep Learning. What are some highly respected textbooks about Deep Learning?

## post by profdean on Feb 28, 2018

I reviewed a book for the Technometrics journal that was just published. The book was called *The Essentials of Data Science - Knowledge Discovery Using R* by Graham J. Williams (CRC Press, 2017). It is actually a companion to another book called *Data Mining with Rattle and R* by Graham Williams (Springer, 2011). Great introductions to data science methods including deep neural networks.

## post by profdean on Feb 28, 2018

I also have two books (actually three but one is at home) on deep learning. One is called *Deep Learning* by Goodfellow, Bengio and Courville (MIT Press, 2016) and *Deep Learning - A Practitioners Approach* by Patterson and Gibson (O’Reilly, 2017). The first book has a website at [www.deeplearningbook.org](http://www.deeplearningbook.org/) and the second one references a website at [deeplearning4j.org](http://deeplearning4j.org/). The second book is an easier read and relies a lot on Apache Spark. Hope this helps.

## post by sabalaba on Feb 28, 2018

I really like Goodfellow, Bengio and Courville 2016. [@profdean](https://deeptalk.lambda.ai/u/profdean), really agree with that recommendation of yours. They’re all luminaries in the field. The book offers a solid introduction and refresher on the key mathematical concepts used throughout the rest of the book and also a great overview of the field in general written by the greats.

I also like *[Practical Recommendations for Gradient-Based Training of Deep Architectures](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.5533.pdf)* (Bengio 2012). It’s a great guide to those just getting started and overwhelmed by all of the hyperparameters involved with training.