Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is, to invoke a technical reviewer cliché, a 'valuable' book. Read it and you will have a detailed and sophisticated practical understanding of the state of the art in neural networks technology. Interestingly, I also suspect it will remain current for a long time, because reading it I came to more and more of an impression that neural network technology (at least in the current iteration) is plateauing. Why? Because this book also makes very clear - is completely honest - that neural networks are a 'folk' technology (though they do not use those words): Neural networks work (in fact they work unbelievably well - at least, as Geoffrey Hinton himself has remarked, given unbelievably powerful computers), but the underlying theory is very limited and there is no reason to think that it will become less limited, and the lack of a theory means that there is no convincing 'gradient', to use an appropriate metaphor, for future development. A constant theme here is that 'this works better than that' for practical reasons not for underlying theoretical reasons. Neural networks are engineering, they are not applied mathematics, and this is very much, and very effectively, an engineer's book.