Show HN: ML From Scratch – free online textbook
Excellent! Very kind of you to do this. Are you accepting comments? If not, ignore the following. :)<p>As someone who learned how to program from trial and error via tutorials on the internet (some of the people who are going to read your book are people like me), I just have one comment:<p>Try not leaning on libraries in your tutorials.<p>I know it sounds insane to suggest you not use numpy in any kind of ML tutorial, but libraries like numpy used to make my new programmer's eyes glaze over. The fact that those imports are black boxes and can do literally anything used to make my noob mind overload. And I'd develop a blind spot for them. Before I could read code that exploited numpy's power, I had to work with numpy for a while to gain an intuition for it. New people don't have that. This isn't just towards numpy, but for all libraries in tutorials. If it's at all possible (I know it's not always possible in a reasonable way), make a super simple example of what you're going to use the library to do before you replace it with the library.<p>As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Sentdex is actually really good at teaching new developers. I think this is because he often starts without numpy. For example in NNFS videos, he starts with just lists. He gets to numpy eventually, but knowing what he replaced with numpy helps make things more clear.<p>Just a thought.