Deep Learning Courses and Books for Beginners

I have compiled this list for CS students who want to understand recent deep learning research papers but have less or no prior experience in deep learning. In this list, I only included resources with which I have first-hand experience. You are welcome to give me feedback and make suggestions.

1 Deep Learning Specialization by Andrew Ng

This classic course by Andrew Ng, one of the leading pioneers in deep learning, is still the best introductory course for beginners. Even though the pace of the course is moderate, thanks to its well-designed organization and the clear explanations by Andrew Ng, the course goes into the details of fundamental methods in deep learning. Below are the YouTube playlists of the previous version of the course.

1. Neural Networks and Deep Learning
2. Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter Tuning, Regularization and Optimization
3. Structuring Machine Learning Projects
4. Convolutional Neural Networks
5. Sequence Models¹

2 Intro to Deep Learning with PyTorch by FaceBook

This is a free online course² offered by PyTorch, an organization behind the well-known deep learning library. In addition to giving a good overview of deep learning, this course provides a gentle introduction to the PyTorch library. One can take part in this simultaneously or after the course by Andrew Ng and practice hands-on programming skills.

3 Deep Learning with PyTorch

This book was freely available on the PyTorch official homepage (perhaps you can still find a free version online). The first part of the book is in particular useful for learning to deal with image data with PyTorch. The other two parts are optional for the beginner.

4 University of Amsterdam Deep Learning Tutorials

This is a compact guide to Deep Learning with PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning examples.

5 Dive into Deep Learning

This is a very comprehensive online book (a PDF version is also available) and includes many recent topics (e.g., Transformers and BERT). This can be read from the start to the end or used as a reference.

6 Understanding Deep Learning

This free deep learning book is being continuously updated by the author. Check the releases.