Reader reviews

Three stars feels about right. Useful, but not essential.

I had been on the fence about this one for a while, and I should have bought it sooner. The examples are small enough to type out and experiment with, which is exactly what I want from a book like this. The book rewards careful reading. Skimming it would be a mistake. Fine, but there are stronger books on the same subject if you look around.

Mixed feelings. The good parts are genuinely good; the rest is forgettable.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. A few of the examples could be more realistic, but the underlying points come across clearly. There is a section near the end that ties several earlier ideas together in a way I had not seen before. Three stars feels about right. It will stay on my shelf, but it will not be the first one I reach for.

A few useful pages, but mostly material I had seen better elsewhere.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. There is a section near the end that ties several earlier ideas together in a way I had not seen before. A few of the examples could be more realistic, but the underlying points come across clearly. The index and cross-references are surprisingly good, which matters for a book I will come back to. Two stars. The subject deserves a better treatment than this.

Better than I expected. Rare to find a technical book this well judged.

There is a particular kind of technical book that is dense without being difficult, and this is one of them. I appreciated the honesty about what the book does not cover — it saved me from expecting things that were not there. The author is unusually honest about where the simplifications break down, which I appreciated. Worth the money and the reading time, without hesitation.

I have read a lot of books on this subject and this is the clearest.

I read this over a couple of weekends alongside a small side project, which turned out to be the ideal way to approach it. A couple of chapters felt like they could have been merged, but that is a minor complaint. Some of the diagrams are dense and I had to reread a few sections, though that may just be me. I have already recommended it to two colleagues and will recommend it to more.

An enjoyable and informative read, though it could have been shorter.

I had been on the fence about this one for a while, and I should have bought it sooner. The chapters on ai & machine learning are the strongest — the examples are stripped down but complete, and I could follow along without constant guessing. The exercises at the end of each chapter are worth doing — they caught a few misconceptions I did not know I had. A good addition to a technical library, as long as you know what you are buying.