Deep Learning with PyTorch Step-by-Step: A Beginner's Guide

If you're looking for a book where you can learn about Deep Learning and PyTorch without having to spend hours deciphering cryptic text and code, and that's easy and enjoyable to read, this is it :-)

The book covers from the basics of gradient descent all the way up to fine-tuning large NLP models (BERT and GPT-2) using HuggingFace. It is divided into four parts:

Part I: Fundamentals (gradient descent, training linear and logistic regressions in PyTorch)
Part II: Computer Vision (deeper models and activation functions, convolutions, transfer learning, initialization schemes)
Part III: Sequences (RNN, GRU, LSTM, seq2seq models, attention, self-attention, transformers)
Part IV: Natural Language Processing (tokenization, embeddings, contextual word embeddings, ELMo, BERT, GPT-2)
This is not a typical book: most tutorials start with some nice and pretty image classification problem to illustrate how to use PyTorch. It may seem cool, but I believe it distracts you from the main goal: how PyTorch works? In this book, I present a structured, incremental, and from first principles approach to learn PyTorch (and get to the pretty image classification problem in due time).

Moreover, this is not a formal book in any way: I am writing this book as if I were having a conversation with you, the reader. I will ask you questions (and give you answers shortly afterward) and I will also make (silly) jokes.

My job here is to make you understand the topic, so I will avoid fancy mathematical notation as much as possible and spell it out in plain English.

In this book, I will guide you through the development of many models in PyTorch, showing you why PyTorch makes it much easier and more intuitive to build models in Python: autograd, dynamic computation graph, model classes and much, much more.

We will build, step-by-step, not only the models themselves but also your understanding as I show you both the reasoning behind the code and how to avoid some common pitfalls and errors along the way.

I wrote this book for beginners in general - not only PyTorch beginners. Every now and then I will spend some time explaining some fundamental concepts which I believe are key to have a proper understanding of what's going on in the code.

Maybe you already know well some of those concepts: if this is the case, you can simply skip them, since I've made those explanations as independent as possible from the rest of the content.