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fastai/fastbook

Analysis updated 2026-06-21

24,934Jupyter NotebookAudience · researcherComplexity · 3/5LicenseSetup · easy

TLDR

The Jupyter Notebook source files for the book "Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and PyTorch", a free, practical introduction to deep learning that gets you building models before diving into theory.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((fastbook))
    What it is
      Book notebooks
      Free MOOC content
      Deep learning course
    Topics covered
      Image recognition
      Text processing
      Tabular data
      Recommendations
    Tech used
      Python
      fastai library
      PyTorch backend
    How to use
      Google Colab
      Local Jupyter
      Buy physical book
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Code map

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Work through hands-on deep learning chapters in Google Colab without installing anything locally.

USE CASE 2

Build and train image classifiers, text models, and recommendation systems using the fastai library.

USE CASE 3

Follow along with the free fast.ai MOOC using the same notebooks as the course.

USE CASE 4

Use the notebooks as a reference when adapting fastai examples to your own custom datasets.

What is it built with?

PythonJupyter NotebookfastaiPyTorch

How does it compare?

fastai/fastbookmicrosoft/omniparserwesm/pydata-book
Stars24,93424,72324,540
LanguageJupyter NotebookJupyter NotebookJupyter Notebook
Setup difficultyeasymoderateeasy
Complexity3/54/52/5
Audienceresearcherresearchergeneral

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

Notebooks are free to run but redistribution is restricted by copyright, use Google Colab to avoid any local setup.

In plain English

This repository contains the Jupyter Notebook source files for the book "Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and PyTorch" by Jeremy Howard and Sylvain Gugger. Jupyter Notebooks are interactive documents that mix explanatory text, code, and output, you can read the explanation and then run the code right in the same document. The book introduces deep learning (a branch of machine learning that uses layered neural networks) using the fastai library, which sits on top of PyTorch and makes common deep learning tasks much simpler to code. The notebooks are the same material used for the fast.ai MOOC (a free online course) at course.fast.ai. They cover topics from basic image recognition, natural language processing (teaching computers to understand text), tabular data analysis, and recommendation systems, all the way to building neural network architectures from scratch. The approach is deliberately top-down, you build working models early and understand the theory later, which is the opposite of traditional academic courses. You'd use this if you want to learn deep learning practically without a math-heavy academic background. The recommended way to start is opening the notebooks in Google Colab, a free browser-based environment where you can run the code without installing anything on your own computer. The physical book is available for purchase separately on Amazon, the notebooks are free to read and run but have copyright restrictions on redistribution. Written in Python using fastai and PyTorch.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I'm on Chapter 1 of the fastbook notebooks in Google Colab and getting a CUDA error when running the image classifier. What are the most common causes and fixes?
Prompt 2
Help me adapt the fastai image classification notebook from fastbook to train on my own folder of labeled product photos instead of the pet breeds dataset.
Prompt 3
Show me how to run the fastbook text classification notebook to fine-tune a language model on a custom CSV of customer reviews.
Prompt 4
I finished the fastbook chapter on tabular data. Write me a checklist of what to check before deploying a fastai tabular model to production.

Frequently asked questions

What is fastbook?

The Jupyter Notebook source files for the book "Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and PyTorch", a free, practical introduction to deep learning that gets you building models before diving into theory.

What language is fastbook written in?

Mainly Jupyter Notebook. The stack also includes Python, Jupyter Notebook, fastai.

How hard is fastbook to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.

Who is fastbook for?

Mainly researcher.

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