4 ms·
My feelings on Part 1: I felt like the setup of the first part was at time a little frustrating, since I started it during a time when Keras had switched to a
by colmvp 9y ago
My feelings on Part 1:
I felt like the setup of the first part was at time a little frustrating, since I started it during a time when Keras had switched to a newer version which wasn't compatible some of the utility code that was written. Add this to the newbie factor to notebooks, and it was a pretty rough first week or so to setup and get actual learning done. It took me a bit of time to realize notebooks were more like repeatable trains of thoughts than well-written production code.
The other thing is that some of the supplementary material was really long and at times made me feel like, why take this course instead of just going through a course mentioned in supplementary material (e.g. CS231n wrt CNN's)? I think I ended up spending hundreds of hours reading/watching/practicing CNN's by reading papers, watching Karpathy's 231n videos, and doing a couple tutorials from data scientists who elaborated on a specific problem they were solving. I guess at times when watching Part 1's videos and doing the notebooks, I didn't feel like I was 'getting it' as much or as fast as when I was getting the information from other means.
While the forum discussions can be helpful, it was also wadding through a ton of unstructured content. And the service they used for the forums hotmapped the find shortcut to their own built-in search, which was a little annoying. I don't know a great solution to having more structured data, but perhaps adding some of questions that were answered to the lesson's Wikipedia. Or maybe splitting the technical issues from the high level concepts.
Lastly, I think it was either HN or /r/MachineLearning but someone had suggested a book regarding Machine Learning and hands-on Tensorflow usage which I picked up, and I felt like my pace of learning really sped up afterwards. I think part of it was Tensorflow has a lot more written about it so when you encounter an odd problem, chances are someone else has something to say about it.
All criticisms aside, I think I'll try going through Part 1 a second time around prior to going through Part 2.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tassl 9y agoWhich book are you referring to?
- drewbuschhorn 9y agoI had the opposite experience. I'm basically as non-math as you can get and still be in the sciences, and I found the classes quite intelligible (on a fast watch without the notebook, and then a slow watch with the notebook for each class). FWIW, I think the supplementary material wasn't strictly necessary from a 'using the libraries' point of view. I'll never contribute to this field, but I feeling like Jeremy's explanation were conceptually helpful if not rigorous. For me, the order was: lesson, notebook+lesson, wiki + supplementary material if something wasn't making sense, and the discussion board if all else failed. That discussion board is basically useless unless you're taking the class in real time I think, which has been my experience for all MOOCs. Different strokes for different folks.
- jph00 9y agoIf you stick to the setup approach in the videos (using the AMIs we created for the course) all the software will be the correct version to go with the notebooks and videos. If you try to use different versions of the software, it'll be a lot more work. CS231n is great and I'm glad you checked it out. There isn't really anything nearly as good online unfortunately for the other areas we covered (NLP, collaborative filtering, etc). CS231n is not as code-oriented as the fast.ai course, and doesn't try to get you to the point you can replicate state of the art results - but it's got great conceptual content and Karpathy is a terrific technical communicator. I think the two courses go hand in hand quite nicely!
- cbrevik 9y agoTotally agree on the unstructured content in the forums. I would suggest they open up the wikis more for editing by MOOC-students, and work to keep that up-to-date. Wading through forums for those nuggets of information to fix your problems is time consuming and boring. Pro-tip: Press CMD+F (or CTRL+F) a second time to "override" the shortcut for search.
- ChristianGeek 9y agoWhich book?