Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've been involved in machine learning as a researcher / practitioner for 5 years, but used R for most of it and was originally reluctant to move to Python (learning pandas, numpy, scipy, and scikit-learn is an intimidating hill to climb when you're already so comfortable in R). I got this book for the deep learning portion (about half of the overall book length), and was shocked at the clarity of the conceptual explanations and code implementations. I've read many extensive explanations of important neural network architectures (FFNs, CNNs, RNNs, ...) and none of them were this clear and intuitive. Within 5 days I was able to go from having zero deep learning experience to easily implementing complicated architectures with TensorFlow. Many people recommend Keras as an alternative to TensorFlow, and I agree... but reading this book allowed me to understand the structure of the underlying code enough to use Keras much more effectively than if I had just started there and never learned what's going on under the hood. I was so impressed with the deep learning portion of this book that I went back and read the rest of it. I can't recommend this work highly enough.