We’re about to get an introduction to supervised learning. Within a couple of chapters, we’ll code our first machine learning system. Then we’ll evolve this system, one small step at a time, until it becomes powerful enough to read handwritten digits.
You read that right: in the next 100 pages, we’ll build an image recognition program. Even better, we’re not going to use any machine learning library. Other than a few general-purpose functions for arithmetic and plotting, we’ll write all of that code by ourselves.
In your future career, you’re unlikely to ever write machine learning algorithms from scratch. But doing it once, to grok the fundamentals… that’s priceless. You will understand every line in the final program. Machine learning will never look like magic again.