Coming from a physics background I once upon a time learned the basics of neural nets from Hertz' book https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9a_SyUG-A24C

Coming from a physics background I once upon a time learned the basics of neural nets from Hertz' book https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9a_SyUG-A24C https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9a_SyUG-A24C It is obviously outdated with respect to modern applications of NNs, but I still think he explains the basics of layered and recurrent networks in a clear fashion.