[jamra]

I just finished the Coursera course by Andrew Ng. It was great. The only hand waving done with math was when calculus was necessary. You can take some extra time to do that work yourself if you like, but you will not be missing the underpinnings of why things work statistically. The introduction to neural networks what finally gave me that aha moment.

It is a very self contained course that is quite easy to follow. You can skip the programming exercises if you don't have the time.

[crazypyro]

For anyone interested in more about the specific math of neural networks, http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/dlbook has a couple good introductory chapters that give overviews of most of the necessary topics for NNs, but also provides additional resource suggestions if you need more in-depth info on a certain subject.