This is an excellent book written by Michael Nielsen. I had tried to learn neural nets earlier, but either found the descriptions too simplistic to come up with

This is an excellent book written by Michael Nielsen. I had tried to learn neural nets earlier, but either found the descriptions too simplistic to come up with a clear understanding, or too complicated. IMHO, in this book, the right learning curve exists, and dare I say, trains up our biological neurons at the optimal learning rate :)