[EdwardRaff]

Brushing up on your math will definitely help! But it's not strictly necessary. It really depends on how deep you want to go.

For the Neural Network type stuff we used in this work, I would recommend Michael Nielsen's awesome website as a starting point http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/ and keras https://keras.io/ is the easiest NN library to pick up and get something going with. Andrew Ng's mooc https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning is also a good starting point for some slightly more general machine learning background.

If you want to avoid the math (not my personal recommendation), I would start there and just mess around. Build small things and start reading more as you get comfortable. Its definitely an area I would encourage learning in an iterative way: try to learn a small amount, try and apply it, repeat.