This video got me started, it runs through building a simple neural net in C++ from scratch: https://vimeo.com/19569529 https://vimeo.com/19569529 After that

This video got me started, it runs through building a simple neural net in C++ from scratch: https://vimeo.com/19569529 https://vimeo.com/19569529 After that I extended it to solve the hand written digits problem. Tweaking it to get past about 80% accuracy taught me a lot of intuition about how the learning rate/other parameters interact. After that going through Andrew Ng's machine learning course will fill in some of the underlying math.