The Little Learner: A Straight Line to Deep Learning

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546379/the-little-learner/

by dgarrett • 3 years ago

405 96 3 years ago

mitpress.mit.edu

A new book in the same series as The Little Schemer!

Here's a preview of the first two chapters: https://mitpress.ublish.com/ebook/the-little-learner-a-strai...

solaxun3• 3 years ago

Nothing little about a 450 page book, but still... I have to buy it.

jjtheblunt• 3 years ago

i think the little part is the chapter sizes on purpose

Y_Y• 3 years ago

I think the little learner is the reader rather than the book

dark-star2• 3 years ago

Wow, I would really like to get this book to complete my set of the Little Schemer, the Seasoned Schemer and the Reasoned Schemer. But 55$ is almost twice as expensive as the other books. Yes, it is bigger than those but still...

Have to think about this for a while :)

scruple• 3 years ago

There's also "The Little Typer" and "The Little Prover."

troupe• 3 years ago

You aren't helping him. :)

legerdemain2• 3 years ago

In the same series, there's also "A Little Java" by Matthias Felleisen, one of the creators of Racket (a popular Lisp).

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561150/a-little-java-a-few-p...

dark-star2• 3 years ago

yeah, I just realized that too. screw it, I'll just grab all of them ;-)

sritchie• 3 years ago

Rated on dollars per hour of brain upgrades, thinking and enjoyment, it doesn’t get better than a good book.

dunham• 3 years ago

The little schemer is $40 now, reasoned schemer is $30, and the little typer is $38 (about twice as thick as the other two).

I had to think on the little schemer, but grabbed it because my ten year old said that the little typer was "interesting", and I thought he might learn something from it.

Probably should finish working through what I have before getting another, though.

kccqzy• 3 years ago

Your ten-year-old was interested in dependent types? You can turn to the back of the book and show him that truths begin with 𝚪 ⊢

frr149• 3 years ago

Shut up and take my money! Now!

boredemployee2• 3 years ago

Why is this book so special, could someone enlighten me?

senthil_rajasek• 3 years ago

I've read the Little Schemer and based on that, it has a unique style of teaching. Every new concept begins as a fun little question and through a series of more questions expands to a whole concept.

It worked very well for me in learning functional programming and some computational theory ideas.

Worth it.

hedgehog06• 3 years ago

Dan Friedman and the Little X-er series.

amelius• 3 years ago

It's special because it ignores the fact that the rest of the world uses Python for deep learning and it's an easy language for beginners too.

drcode• 3 years ago

this series of books has an unusual pedagogical style, with a big "bang for the buck" in terms of building up complex systems from basic steps

there is zero fluff, almost zero narration

the books are basically just input output pairs of "now do this, and now that happens"

they are basically a sort of brain data dump for people who can think with computer code

rootusrootus2• 3 years ago

people who can think with computer code

In particular, Scheme. If your language of choice is, say, Python, then you'll want to get a primer on Scheme before reading this particular book. Maybe by starting at the beginning of the series.

leoc2• 3 years ago

Guy Steele's keynote talk at Dan Friedman's 60th-birthday academic festival, "Dan Friedman--Cool Ideas", gives lots of the background: https://youtu.be/IHP7P_HlcBk?t=2198 . Apparently the format was originally a parody or adaptation of that of an IBM Fortran instruction manual based on Skinnerian programmed-instruction ideas.

solaxun3• 3 years ago

Books in the little series are all about "learning by doing", and teach using the Socratic method (question/answer). Each concept is introduced with small problems that build upon each other. You are forced to get your hands dirty from the beginning, passive learning is not really an option. For most people, I think this helps facilitate a much deeper understanding than just reading a text.

I always had trouble with recursive functions when I was new to programming, and many recommended working through "the little schemer" to solve that problem. It was a tough read for me, but the investment was well worth it and it did for me what it said on the tin. I didn't have nearly as much trouble with recursion after that book, but an unfortunate side effect was developing an affinity for lisps which I haven't yet shaken.

boredemployee2• 3 years ago

ok cool! thanks for explaining. do you think a beginner in the world of AI and programming would benefit from this DL book as well?

m463• 3 years ago

"learning by doing"

Too little of that in this world nowadays. Too much ios and not enough arch linux.

bigdict3• 3 years ago

No way. Does it use Scheme?

EDIT: Half Life 3 confirmed: "Presents key ideas of machine learning using a small, manageable subset of the Scheme language"

rootusrootus2• 3 years ago

Very much so.

hedgehog06• 3 years ago

Yes. At least from the preview.

tejtm• 3 years ago

Have not tries this one (yet) but Racket/base is fine for the previous books.

pbk1• 3 years ago

IIRC you can use Racket base so long as you define the “atom” function per the book authors

zelphirkalt2• 3 years ago

Some time ago I wrote this: https://notabug.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-ml -- It contains a parallelized decision tree implementation in GNU Guile, a Scheme dialect. There is also https://github.com/lloda/guile-ffi-cblas which at least gives fast matrix multiplication. Example usage I have here: https://notabug.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-math-examples/src...

I don't know what is in the book, but things are possible.

bigdict3• 3 years ago

For sure, Lecun wrote a DL framework in Lisp decades ago.

fithisux2• 3 years ago

Love the beauty of Scheme, but lack of types (mypy Python / Java dev/ TS dev) infuses fear to me.

I think with a little of patience I can get by.

mark_l_watson• 3 years ago

I am looking at the GitHub repo for the Malt library developed in the book https://github.com/themetaschemer/malt. It looks like they use Racket (Scheme) vectors to implement tensors. I experimented with loading Keras simple models into Racket several years ago: the built in math library matrix support was fast enough for my needs so the book software may be both pedagogical and useful for smaller problems.

EDIT: I have not tried the OpenBLAS Racket bindings here (https://github.com/soegaard/sci) but perhaps the low level tensor and tensor ops book code could be optimized,

jkmcf• 3 years ago

Are there other books written in this format?

I know _why wrote his books as a conversation between two foxes.

tmountain• 3 years ago

Yes, a whole series. Look until the author for more.

Jtsummers• 3 years ago

The Little Schemer (formerly LISPer) - Intro to Scheme, or perhaps an introduction to computing with Scheme. Guess it depends on perspective.

The Seasoned Schemer - More on Scheme.

The Reasoned Schemer - Minikanren in Scheme

The Little Prover - Proofs about programs

The Little Typer - Dependent types

The Little MLer - The ML language, not machine learning.

A Little Java - Java

I have the first 5 books, but never got around to finishing Little Prover or Typer (got married and moved that year, probably not the best time to try and start something like that). Definitely like the first three and what I read in those other two.

selimthegrim• 3 years ago

Smullyan, but those are decades old and not application focused.

tluyben2• 3 years ago

If this is anything like the others in the series. I really like the style of the others; it is a really good way of learning for me. And the little prover&typer was when I already was well versed in the theory but they were really good to work through nonetheless.

So yep, must have. If you haven’t read the rest, they are really must haves imho.

bzhang2552• 3 years ago

The initial preview is a little disappointing because it feels like it does a great job displaying the pedagogical style but not enough to demonstrate the pedagogical value (i.e. whether this resource actually does a good job teaching a complex topic).

Given the wealth of information and the problem of appraising it all, I don't think it helps this book that it costs $55 and requires the reader to learn an esoteric language (for the field), when there are so many educational books and lecture series by experts in the field that you can find freely available online.

sn9• 3 years ago

The great thing about Scheme is that you can learn it in less than 10 minutes and focus on the ideas.

bzhang2552• 3 years ago

Sure - but I think that's the least important part of my comment. The preview is basically just an intro to Scheme. I would rather be able to see how well the book covers interesting ideas about deep learning. While the jury is still out, my personal skepticism is that this is a really beautiful passion project that looks great on bookshelves, but that any serious learner would be better served dedicating their time to working through the existing, more traditional, and very high-quality resources available online.

timmg• 3 years ago

The initial preview is a little disappointing because it feels like it does a great job displaying the pedagogical style but not enough to demonstrate the pedagogical value (i.e. whether this resource actually does a good job teaching a complex topic).

This is exactly the concern I had when I saw what it was. I'll definitely keep my eye on it and read the reviews.

jhbadger• 3 years ago

I would think that the main audience for this books would be people who enjoyed the other books in the authors' "Little" series, which almost all use Scheme, so it wouldn't be something new to learn.

veqq• 3 years ago

Checking the library the book implements can help: https://github.com/themetaschemer/malt

cinjon• 3 years ago

At what age is this appropriate?

nextos2• 3 years ago

I hope this motivates an effort to add great bindings to TF/Torch from Racket/Scheme.

d0m• 3 years ago

Very cool! I have such fond memories of The Little Schemer

mattfrommars• 3 years ago

Someone who has access to O'Reilly and other free source to learn ML/AI e.g. Fast.ai, is there any advantage of buying this?

havercosine3• 3 years ago

'Little..' series books are famous for their pedagogical style: small bit of concepts, presented as a dialogue, making you think at each step, in a well thought out order. It will appeal to anyone who wants to build it out themselves, understand the 'big' ideas in the field. Skim through the second chapter to see how this will be done: they define line function in inverted way where slope and intercept are taken as parameters later. Feels weird but exactly the mental model shift we should be doing when thinking about ML.

Read the preface. A very high praise coming from Guy Steele Jr and Peter Norvig.

At the same time, a warning! Scheme based introductions don't appeal to everyone. Some people feel way out of comfort zone in coding with it (which is sad because it is much simpler). Also, the utilitarian appeal is low: it won't right away see a step change in your Pytorch knowledge or whatever. The appeal of these books is to think deeply about fundamental ideas by implementing them in simplest language without too much help.

In short, YMMV. But if you have a long term view it might help you a lot than sort of currently fashionable trends. (Though I must admit that fast.ai is not just a flavor of the season resources but much better!)

hedgehog06• 3 years ago

So you mean that fast.ai maybe a better resource for people new to general ML?

kamaal• 3 years ago

Not yet available in India. Hope they launch soon!

SomeHacker44• 3 years ago

I went through some of the eBook providers but none seem to be offering a PDF version. Did anyone notice if a PDF version was for sale?

rychco• 3 years ago

I’m also interested in this. Unfortunately, the other schemer/typer books appear to be available for kindle… so that’s likely the best we’ll get

anjanb• 3 years ago

I didn't find one. However, amazon has a kindle version, which might not be what you're looking for!

alostpuppy• 3 years ago

Just to piggy back on this. The typesetting seems off kindle and other ebook platforms. Anyone seeing this?

tauchunfall• 3 years ago

I bought "The Reasoned Schemer" as physical book and searched for a way to buy it as a PDF version, but could find it nowhere (also had no problem to pay twice for the book).

The Kindle version of it does not even have fixed table cell width for the layout of the conversation.

German book website buecher.de has "The Little Learner" to preorder as ePUB with Adobe DRM. I don't know, if you can buy digital books on this site outside of Germany. Also notice, that copy-protected digital books on this website are highly unusual; most of the books are with watermark instead, if at all.

I have no clue why a book with pedagogical background and custom layout, has copy-protection and no print-quality PDF version (but instead one with poor layout).

superdisk• 3 years ago

I helped proofread this book, definitely check it out.

hedgehog06• 3 years ago

What do you think of this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34812501

john29917958• 3 years ago

You are the best!

runevault• 3 years ago

This looks interesting, though I'd probably do at LEAST little schemer finally before checking this one out (been meaning to pick up some of the Little x books but haven't, though I've been getting back to lisp through CL on things like PAIP).

darthrupert• 3 years ago

I have none of these "The Little" books in my bookshelf, and I would gladly purchase a bunch of them. Are there any such deals anywhere?

The Little Learner: A Straight Line to Deep Learning

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