3 ms·

I know the book, I wrote it! Most of the math is vector space arithmetic. There are a few sections that use matrix multiplication. The probability and stats i

I know the book, I wrote it! Most of the math is vector space arithmetic. There are a few sections that use matrix multiplication. The probability and stats is stuff like understanding probability distributions and Bayes's Theorem. (It's all covered in the book, but you'd need to be comfortable picking it up and using it.) In terms of programming, not much. Someone who's never programmed before would probably have a tough time, but the goal is that someone who is bright and hardworking and who can write fairly simple Python programs should not have a problem. Very little CS background required. Maybe basic data structures like list vs dict and so on.

Goladus 11y ago
Reading this comment for some reason makes me curious how much time the book spends addressing computer science fundamentals like cpu and memory. My guess is that it's included in bits and pieces along the way but I didn't see anything explicit in the table of contents. I'm thinking about it in terms of running computation in production environments where you may be constrained by available compute resources or budget. Some people have an intuitive grasp of cpu/memory/bandwidth and can do performance tuning as necessary, but those who don't can find themselves in situations where they waste a lot of resources, such as running a million parallel jobs that each have less than 1 second of CPU time, getting stuck after failing to request or provision nodes with sufficient memory, or performing unnecessary reads and writes.