A good course that comes close to this would be the Coursera Machine Learning course (what used to be known as "ML Class" by Andrew Ng). It uses Octave - but y

A good course that comes close to this would be the Coursera Machine Learning course (what used to be known as "ML Class" by Andrew Ng). It uses Octave - but you first do everything (in the section on NN) "by hand" - building and looping for the matrix operations. Only after you've gone that far, does he (Ng) introduce the fact that Octave has vector/matrix primitives... I took the original ML Class in the Fall of 2011; it was a great class, and opened my eyes a great deal on the topic of machine learning and neural networks, which I had struggled with understanding in the past (mainly on what and how backprop worked).