Artificial Intelligence for Humans, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms Paperback – 26 Nov. 2013

Excellent introductory book, and don't forget to grab the online resources at git

I found the book hard to read. The equations were unreadable on my Kindle as the font was too small. The code was occasionally difficult to follow. The grammar could have been better.The breadth and depth of content, however, was excellent. The book explained the principles, the maths and gave code examples across a lot of different topics. I learnt a lot and that benefit ultimately trumps the issues with the layout and iffy code.

These books seems to be written more by a hobbist than a professional. They often say the same basic things several times, they lack depth, and lack inspriational applications. I don't recomend them to anyone. Sorry.

To started with I hated this book - I almost tore it up - but then I liked it a bit.. then I liked it a lot.This book is in sore need of some editing: there are a lot of grammar errors some of which make some of the explanations difficult to decipher. In some cases I had to resort to Google to untangle some terminology.BUT...For some one who :- is starting from scratch with AI;- can already programme; and- who has some maths (age 18)the book is a perfect run thru of the basic principles patterns and terminology of AI. It does a wonderful job of ordering the introduction of concepts so that they build on each other, by small increments, in a logical way so that you are hardly aware of the transition from trivial to profound.The book identifies key pragmatic abstractions and, despite, the unpolished drafting, does the priceless task of identifying the core of simplicity around which complexity can later be built.The book is self published and the guy clearly edited himself which goes to show how important an objective view can be. He would really have benefited from some hard talking.Despite this however, the fundamental cleverness and appropriateness of the approach provides a succinct introduction to the subject.

It's hard to believe that Jeff Heaton has written code that anyone has had to work with or read for anything else than an exercise. Even the latter should mean that he writes code that should be readable and easy to follow, and more importantly actually correct, but such is not the case. Very little care was given to the code quality of this book, and it hurts the examples in it. They are suitable only for bad C/C++ code and if you are looking for examples with useful abstractions in them you would do well in completely skipping this book.The part about equilateral encoding is especially painful and will leave even the most patient of readers annoyed. Heaton is the archetypical shitty coder that will use one-letter variables that represent important parts of a formula without explaining them. The part mentioned above also uses uninitialized variables with one-letter names, as if to further confuse readers.There are a few paragraphs of text interspersed with the code that are, I assume, supposed to shed light on what is happening, but they rarely actually augment the meaning of the code or what is supposed to be happening.This is not a good book for anyone but people who already know the material and simply want to refresh or confirm knowledge. I'm quite sure that the material is correct in scope, but it does not do a close to decent job in explaining stuff and uses downright bad code for most things in it.All in all I think the book could have been served well by having Heaton define functions that were smaller in scope and had well defined purposes. They could then be used as abstractions (that have been well explained) and would lead to cleaner examples. As it stands, Heaton writes pseudo code as if it was C (and actually uses 'alloc()' in it), which serves very little purpose in the end, since you're supposed to be explaining a concept, not writing hacky code while having an audience.There is no reason to buy this book (as I did, while making the mistake to buy the second book in the series immediately as well), but it's wise to check what is in this book and then read up on it elsewhere, as you're likely to do so anyway. The "ahaaa" to reading ratio in this book is extremely low, as it doesn't actually explain much anyway.

It has a really nice old-school eighties programming feel and I like it a lot .. I had to work a bit to get the Java compiler and programs running .. but am now enjoying working through well presented ideas..

This book seems to be a vanity publishing exercise and it clearly hasn't had an editor go through it, or if it did then the author was the editor. Neither does it seem that the contents of the book have been peer reviewed. To see how bad some of the explanations are turn to page 14 and witness the full horror of the explanation about the Bag of Words algorithm. This is a very simple algorithm but Heaton mangles it badly.I recommend that you do not buy this book. Instead, look at the table contents and Google the explanations for each of the entries. It is cheaper and you won't be in the position that I am in which is to feel like writing to Jeff Heaton and demanding my money back.Quite possibly the most badly written computer text I have ever read. Period.

The book is Okay. Nothing more, nothing less. I felt it lacked focus. Some terms and definitions were explained well, while others less so.