[fhadley]

deeplearning.net and the ufldl tutorial are excellent places to start. I've also perused this ebook recently and found it to be pretty solid in terms of giving mathematically solid but still intuitive. last but not least, absolutely do no whatsoever "do a small project on deep learning or try out [a] few kaggle competitions." instead, pick up a paper that interests you and implement the methods they describe therein.

edit: here's the ebook link neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com