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The best textbooks, the ones considered classic gems in their field, are careful about what they say and what they leave out. You get the sense that every word
by freyr 7y ago
The best textbooks, the ones considered classic gems in their field, are careful about what they say and what they leave out. You get the sense that every word is in its right place.
By comparison, Goodfellow and his co-authors seemed to just dump everything they know onto the page. It's fragmented, bloated, and it meanders all over the place. Goodfellow was on a recent podcast where he seems to acknowledge that the book straddles an awkward place between tutorial and reference.
I don't mean to sound too harsh. I appreciate its scope, and I've certainly read much worse textbooks.
- nilkn 7y agoConsidering how much is not in the book -- and that the book is not even that large as far as textbooks go -- part of me feels this criticism is somewhat disingenuous. I'd agree that the direction of the final part on research topics feels fragmented, but the rest of the book certainly doesn't. It's very clearly focused on developing deep neural networks and doesn't actually meander at all. If the worst you can say is it's not a classic text, that's really not saying much at all. I feel weird defending the book so much when to me it's just a book I found useful and I don't even feel that strongly towards it. But the strength of some of the criticism here doesn't seem motivated by the book itself.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]