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fastai/fastbook

24,969Jupyter NotebookAudience · vibe coderComplexity · 2/5StaleLicenseSetup · moderate

TLDR

Free Jupyter Notebooks teaching deep learning with fastai and PyTorch, using a practical top-down approach where you build working models first and learn theory later.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it does
      Interactive notebooks
      Teaches deep learning
      Practical examples
    Topics covered
      Image recognition
      Natural language
      Tabular data
      Recommendation systems
    How to use
      Open in Colab
      Run code inline
      No installation needed
    Tech stack
      Python
      fastai
      PyTorch
    Learning style
      Top-down approach
      Build first
      Theory second
    Audience
      Beginners
      No math background

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Learn deep learning from scratch without a math-heavy background by running interactive code examples.

USE CASE 2

Build image recognition models, text classifiers, and recommendation systems using practical, working examples.

USE CASE 3

Study neural network architectures and how they work by implementing them step-by-step in Jupyter.

USE CASE 4

Access the same material from the free fast.ai online course and work through it at your own pace.

Tech stack

PythonJupyter NotebookfastaiPyTorch

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

PyTorch and fastai installation can be slow; GPU setup optional but recommended for practical exercises.

Free to read and run the notebooks, but copyright restrictions apply to redistribution; the physical book is sold separately.

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 want to learn deep learning but don't have a strong math background. How do I start with the fastbook notebooks in Google Colab?
Prompt 2
Show me how to build an image classification model using the fastai library from the fastbook notebooks.
Prompt 3
I'm stuck on the natural language processing chapter in fastbook. Can you explain how the text preprocessing works in fastai?
Prompt 4
How do I run the fastbook notebooks locally on my computer instead of using Google Colab?
Prompt 5
Walk me through building a recommendation system using the fastbook approach with fastai and PyTorch.
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