[ghaff]

Some intuition about minima (gradual descent), linear regression, etc. will get you to a certain level--which admittedly may be a bit hard if you've never had the math. But as others have suggested, you probably need to equivalent of a few semesters of calculus and linear algebra (which I never took in a formal way though I did some variants of pre-MatLab).

[Jasonseah]

I did try to play around with Octave / MatLab to play with the calculation but not in a very comfortable way ...