| kudos to OP! AI & ML are also on my list for 2020!! > All of the theory and such is mostly worthless, its too much to learn from scratch and you will probably use very little of it. i, too, believe in code before theory. but not for stats, artificial intelligence, or machine learning, numerical computing, etc. why? because, for instance, if you compare a popular & successful machine learning framework to a "build your own deep neural network in 150 lines of python", the difference as far as data structures or programming constructs choices will be staggering. especially if you are an experienced programmer. or just someone who cares about the data structures and programming constructs in the first place. but these choices are not accidental! you will find that "parameters" are represented by a "class", ie. objects with associated operations and not values. why? because you want to do things like accumulate contributions to derivatives, and all these other calculus things i thought i was never going to ever use. theory is important for people who truly care! |