I was invited by the publisher to review this book and provide my thoughts on that. Overall, I found the book to be very informative and well laid out. It takes you through the very basics of backpropagation to advanced implementations in PyTorch. The book assumes that the reader does have an understanding of Python at the very least, which I think beginners in deep learning should be aware of. Please find my honest thoughts on the book as follows:
What I liked:
I felt the book is very well structured and compiled. Unless you're looking for something very very specific, you'd be able to find techniques/implementations for any and all types of problems you are working on. They cover algorithms and implementations of basic neural networks, all the way upto RNNs and reinforcement learning with PyTorch. The breadth covered by this book on the number of techniques and algorithms is really amazing. Not only that, each of these topics are covered with amazing depth as well, making the book a must have for someone just starting out with PyTorch. The progression in difficulty of the book, also makes it beginner friendly.
What I would like to be there:
I would love to see 2 things added to this book:
1. Tensorboard setup with PyTorch, and usage. Although it's trivial, it would take some getting used to in setting up tensorboard with PyTorch. It's fairly common to use a graphical visualization tool like this while training and tracking your models. A small chapter, or a section in the appendix on how to setup tensorboard with PyTorch, and some examples to integrate that into your pipeline, would really be amazingly beneficial for any beginner/ intermediate user!
2. PyTorch models can't generally be used directly in the industry because most embedded chips don't have compilers for .pth models. Most chip manufacturers (unless you're using nvidia GPUs itself), have compilers implemented for either tensorflow, caffe models or the cross compatible ONNX format. I think a small section on converting your models into ONNX would really be beneficial for anyone just starting out and targeting embedded/high performance applications on the edge
All in all, I loved and enjoyed reading the book. It is a definite recommendation from my side for anyone who is starting out with PyTorch, or someone looking to implement advanced algorithms (more than just the basic feedforward networks or CNNs). Amazing work by Ayyadevara and Reddy! :)
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